Before adding our plugin into our Master Ableton setlist, we need to make sure we’ve got everything set up correctly. There are also some helpful features that Conductor offers that we’ll be discussing in this post. If you’re unfamiliar with setting up tracks in arrangement view, check out this post before continuing.

Prepping Your Ableton Live Session for Conductor

We must make sure we have a locator at the beginning of all of our songs. This will communicate to Conductor where each song begins. Add in a locator and rename it with the name of the song it corresponds to.

We can also add in the duration of each of our songs. (This will come in handy later as Conductor will calculate the duration of our entire set based on these values.) If you’re unsure about the duration of your song, just highlight an area that’s the width of your song and you’ll see it written at the bottom in the Status Bar.

Add the duration to the name of your song locator in the format (MM:SS). So in our example, we’d write “Song A (03:21)”

(TIP: You can also hide songs from Conductor by adding “*HIDE” at the end of the song name)

Lastly, we can add in follow actions to the end of each song, these determine what happens at the end of each track. You have 3 options.

STOP – This will stop playback and cue the next song

NEXT – This will start the next song when the current song ends, this will be on the next down beat

WAIT – This will keep the playback marker at the end of the current song

If you want to add a follow action, simply create a locator at the end of your song, rename the locator, add an asterisk followed by the action you want. For example “*STOP”.

If you don’t add one in, Conductor will automatically put “None”, which as the name suggests, does nothing.

Closing Thoughts

This is a brief intro into making sure your songs are properly categorised in Conductor. In the next post, we’ll take a look at categorising our song sections.

Thanks for reading!