Okay, so we’re finally ready to bring our setlist manager plugin, Conductor, into our Ableton set. Before we begin, be sure that you’ve named your songs, added your song durations, marked out your song sections and added a marker at the end of your song for follow actions. If you need a hand with any of these, check out our previous few posts.

(TIP 1: If you’re using MIDI clips to mark out your song sections, be sure to put the Conductor plugin on that MIDI channel. If you’re using locators to mark out your song sections, feel free to create a blank MIDI channel and put Conductor there.)

(TIP 2: If you’ve made any mistakes that you notice after loading up Conductor, you can amend the mistake, let’s say a spelling mistake for example, then press ‘Reload’ and Conductor will update your changes.)

Building A Setlist Using Conductor

Once you’ve added Conductor in, you’ll be greeted with the ‘Minimised View’. 

Click on the ‘Expand’ button in the top right, which will show the ‘Expanded View’. In this view, you have two windows, the left has all of your songs and the right is your setlist.

By default the songs in your song bank will be organised by the order they are in your Ableton set. If they aren’t in alphabetical order, simply press the A-Z button to order them alphabetically. This means you don’t have to build a setlist alphabetically but can still easily find songs in Conductor. There’s also a search function at the bottom of the ‘All Songs’ window.

Select the song you want and then press ‘Add to Set’. This will populate the ‘Setlist’ window on the right. If you add a song by mistake you can press ‘Delete Song’ to remove it. You can also clear the entire set by clicking ‘Clear Set’. Once you’re happy with your set, click ‘Save Setlist’

It may be a good idea to create a folder for all of your Conductor setlists.

Then Save your set.

You can also load your setlist by clicking ‘Load Setlist’. You’ll be prompted to choose a file, select the one you want and click ‘Open’. This will then load up the setlist in Conductor.

Closing Thoughts

We hope you’ve been able to see how helpful Conductor is in controlling Ableton in a live setting and how it can build, edit, save and load setlists. As we continue to walk through how to use Conductor, feel free to jump back to previous posts to recap anything you may have missed and as always, reach out to us at hello@renderthemusic.com if you have any questions.

Thanks for reading!