Clips & Scenes
The session grid — holding several versions of each part and launching them together as scenes.
Jam Club arranges music the way Ableton Live's session view does. Each instrument is a column, each column holds up to five clip slots, and each slot holds one pattern. A scene is a horizontal row across every column — launching it switches all your instruments at once.
Clips
A clip is a pattern in a slot. Because each instrument has five slots, you can keep several versions of a part — a verse bassline and a chorus bassline, a sparse beat and a busy one — and move between them without editing anything.
Working with slots
- Click a filled slot to select and launch that clip.
- Click an empty slot to create a new, empty pattern there.
- Cmd/Ctrl + D on a focused clip duplicates it into the next slot — the usual way to make a variation is to duplicate the thing that already works and change one part of it.
- Drag a slot to reorder patterns within the column.
Scenes
The rail down the left-hand side launches scenes. Launching scene 3 tells every instrument to play whatever is in its third slot.
Empty slots stop instruments
If an instrument has nothing in the slot for the scene you launch, that instrument stops. This is the same convention Ableton uses, and it is what makes scenes an arrangement tool rather than just a preset recall — a chorus scene can drop the pad simply by leaving its slot empty.
Tip: This is the key idea to internalise. To build an arrangement, think about which instruments should be silent in each section, not only which should be playing.
Scene highlighting
A scene lights up when the grid exactly matches the state that launching it would produce. Launch a scene and then change one clip by hand, and the scene stops being highlighted — an accurate reflection of the fact that what you are hearing is no longer that scene.
Manual launching
Launching individual clips still works while scenes are in play. You can run a scene as your base and then swap one part by hand, which is how most live performance in this kind of interface actually happens.
Where to go next
- Song Structure — chaining scenes into a whole arrangement that plays itself.
- Note Grid & Editing — writing what goes in a clip.
- Mixer — balancing parts as you switch scenes.