DOJO 8 “Gate Legato” in Ableton Live

Ableton Session view is great because it lets you launch clips in different modes:



Trigger (touch to start the clip, you’ll need to hit a stop button to stop it)

(touch to start the clip, you’ll need to hit a stop button to stop it) Gate (touch and hold to play the clip, as soon as you release, the clip will stop)

(touch and hold to play the clip, as soon as you release, the clip will stop) Toggle (touch to start, touch again to stop)

(touch to start, touch again to stop) Repeat (touch and hold to repeat the clip based on the quantification rate (works best at ¼ to 1/32)





Another feature is the Legato Mode.

When clips are all in legato mode, they will start playing at the position relative to the master playback, instead of always starting from the beginning.

It is really useful when playing long clips (more than 2 bars), that contain variations.

Here I have 2 clips of a voice with a LFO filter slowly going from low to high frequency.





When putting both clips in Legato mode, you can see that Trigger and Repeat mode behave the same, while Gate doesn’t take into account the legato mode.

So here is the problem:

“How can we hear the clip only when we touch it (Gate) while it keeps over the playback position (Legato) ?”

There are at least 2 ways to solves this limitation:

Using a Sidechained Gate audio effect

Mapping custom midi messages



1) Gate Legato using Sidechain Gate

This technique was brilliantly demonstrated in this video. We will adapt it to solve our current problem.

What you will need is a midi track, an audio track with your clips inside and the audio effect Gate loaded in it.

Here are the settings for the Gate:

Sidechain ON from your midi track (post FX) (Click the little triangle to open/close the side chain panel.)



Every other parameters which are not part of the sidechain need to be put at their minimum (as shown below)



Put your audio clips with Trigger, Legato, No Quatization, and RAM (they need to be Warped correctly obviously!)

On the midi track you can load Operator with white noise, or simpler with a white noise sample. Make sure your ADSR have no attack, no decay, no release and full Sustain.

Create a midi clip that will play the sound from your synth, and put it in Gate mode with no Quantization.

Group these two tracks, and you can now trigger your audio clip as Gate Legato.

Note that you can also use this technique with midi clips instead of audio clips. For exemple create different settings of a synth by changing adjusting its parameters as automations (like in video below).

Download the demo project to learn by exemple >>

2) Mapping custom midi/keyboard messages

I first used that technique for my remake of Daft Punk’s Alive 2008 on Lemur (bottom right multi-touch screen).





To make it work, you need to place your clips in a grid so that there is only one clip per row and column.

Create a group of all these tracks. Remove all stop buttons in that grid. At the bottom place an empty audio clip that will be used to stop all clips while keeping playback position. All clips must be Warped, and in Trigger + Legato with no Quantization and in the RAM

Then you need to map the launch button of the group row with its associated volume.

Repeat the process for each instances.

The cool thing is you can change the clips without having to remap anything. As long as they are in Trigger + Legato.

The advantage of this method is you that you can play several clips simultaneously.

Important: if you map using your keyboard, the key will behave as toggle knobs, therefore cancelling the gate effect. For optimal fun, use a midi controller with momentary pads.









Hope you will enjoy this technique. It is great to have fun triggering loops if you have a launchpad, Push or Touch-Able midi controller!



