AbleSet's Cue Notation

AbleSet uses Ableton's locators (short: cues) to determine where songs start and end. The simplest form of a cue contains just the song title and is located at the song's beginning:

Never Gonna Give You Up. Using this cue will lead to that title appearing as a song in AbleSet.

To ensure that playback runs smoothly, you should always place cues on a beat, if possible on a downbeat. If you place the cue between two beats, Ableton's quantization will not always work as expected.

To give AbleSet more information on what a marker means, you can use a more advanced cue notation:

Subcues

A subcue starts with a

> followed by the name – for example

> Verse 2. You can use it to divide a song into multiple sections. Those sections can then be triggered from AbleSet.

If you want your subcue to be quickly accessible within performance view, you can prefix it with

>> – for example

>> Chorus.

Sections can also be defined using MIDI clips on a Sections track starting with Live 11. This causes less visual clutter in your arrangement view. You can learn more about it here.

Cue Descriptions

Everything written in curly brackets is interpreted as a description. You can use this feature to add information like the song's key, tempo, and length. Example:

Follow Night {Tuning: C, Capo 1}

You can also add descriptions to subcues.

Stop Markers

There are two ways to get AbleSet to automatically stop playback after a song. If you place a cue named

STOP or

AUTOSTOP in your set, AbleSet will automatically stop playback there.

If you place all songs directly next to each other, you can add a dot to the beginning of the song cue that follows the song after which you want playback to stop (for example:

. Follow Night). AbleSet will stop playback when it reaches this cue.

Both ways only work with normal cues, not with subcues, but can be combined as desired. So one song can be stopped by a

STOP cue while the next song can be stopped by a dot cue. Depending on how you want to structure your live set, it might make more sense to use one or the other.

Normally, AbleSet will either jump to the next song's cue or stay at the stop cue upon reaching it depending on the "Autojump to the Next Song" setting, but you can override this behavior by adding either a

+JUMP or

+STAY flag to the stop cue – for example

STOP +JUMP tells AbleSet to automatically jump to the next song's cue when the stop marker is reached.

Pause Markers

Using pause markers, you can tell AbleSet to pause playback at a certain section. To do that, you can add a

+PAUSE flag to the cue – for example

> Chorus +PAUSE.

Song End Markers

If you want to mark the end of a song but don't want playback to stop, you can place a cue named

SONG END where your song ends. When this cue is reached, AbleSet will directly jump to the next song in the setlist if there is one.

Loop Markers

If you want to loop a section of your song, you can do so by adding

+LOOP to the end of the cue where you want the loop to start. AbleSet will then loop from this cue until the next cue until you skip to the next marker in the web app.

If you want AbleSet to always finish a loop before jumping to the next cue, you can use

+LOOPFULL instead of

+LOOP.

This is supported since version 1.4.0 and I made a short video to explain it:

Song Durations

If you want to set the duration of a song manually, you can do so by adding it to the end of the cue in square brackets. For example,

Follow Night [3:20] will set the song's duration to 3:20 minutes.

This can be helpful for songs with variable tempo for which AbleSet can't automatically determine the duration.

Colors

This feature is supported since 1.9.0. To color-code cues, you can add a color name to the cue in square brackets – e.g.

Galvanize [blue].

By default, subcues use the same color as the song they're assigned to, but you can override the color by adding a color name to the subcue – e.g.

> Verse [red].

The following colors are supported:

• Gray
• Red
• Orange
• Amber
• Yellow
• Lime
• Green
• Emerald
• Teal
• Cyan
• Sky
• Blue
• Indigo
• Violet
• Purple
• Fuchsia
• Pink
• Rose

Ignored Cues

If you want AbleSet to ignore a cue, just prefix it with a

*. This might be interesting for making notes in your live session:

* Check automation

AbleSet also ignores Clyphx cues, like

[STOP] SETSTOP; MIDI NOTE 3 1 127; so they don't clutter up your setlist.