In this post, we’ll briefly cover Conductor’s interface and different views.

It is pretty straightforward and simple, but just to break it down for us all, there are 2 views:

1. Minimised View
2. Expanded View

Expanded View has 2 Modes

1. Show Mode
2. Program Mode

Minimised View

Quite simply, the Minimised View just has the essentials that we discussed in one of our previous posts.

Play – Starts playback

Stop – one tap stops playback, 2 taps moves playhead to start of current song, 3 taps moves playhead to start of set

Loop Section – Loops current section

Count In – Starts playback earlier by a predetermined amount of bars

Reload – Refreshes Conductor to pick up any updates from Ableton

Expand – Changes to ‘Expanded View’

Current Song display – Shows current song

Previous/Next Song – Restarts song/goes to next song (quantised)

Current Section display – Shows current section

Previous/Next Song Section – restarts current section/moves to next section (quantised)

Expanded View

First, Show Mode. (Probably the one you’ll use during shows.)

In addition to everything from the minimised view. You also have 

Minimise – Reverts to ‘Minimised View’

Setlist Window & Follow actions – Shows all songs in your current setlist and what happens at the end of each song

Program/Show Mode toggle – Toggles between ‘Program Mode’ and ‘Show Mode’

Delete Song – Removes song from setlist

Clear Set – Clears all songs in setlist

Set Length – Calculated duration of all songs in setlist

Lastly, Program Mode.

This mode has everything from the Minimised View + Expanded View (Show Mode) and also

Cues & Clips Toggle – Toggles between using locators or MIDI clips to determine song sections.

All Songs window and duration – Displays all songs from Ableton setlist and their durations

A-Z Filter – Sorts all songs in alphabetical order

Add to Set – Add selected song to setlist

Search Bar – Filters songs displayed in the All songs window by the entered text.

Closing Thoughts

We hope this brief overview of the views (and modes) of Conductor has been helpful. Before we ended this post though, we wanted to advise using Expanded View – Show Mode, for live sets.

We say this because in addition to the basic transport controls that you need, you also have a list of all the songs in your set top to bottom right in front of you. The advantage is knowing what’s coming next and what type of follow action happens at the end of each song.

It’s also helpful not having all the songs listed simultaneously so as not to cause confusion or accidentally cue up the wrong song. That being said though, if you need to find a song you can quickly switch to ‘Program Mode’, search for the desired song and cue it by double clicking on it.

In our next post, we’ll be discussing the Loop option in Conductor, so be sure to check back.

Thanks for reading!