CONCEPT
Retrospective looping is a concept which let you decide AFTER playing/recording to keep the last bars recorded. There are two scenarios where this can be really helpful and beneficial: When you improvise, you know that you want to loop something after you have played it. Or in the realm of scripted looping it can take off the pressure to nail a difficult passage so you can choose to play the loop again until you’ve nailed it.
I coded some useractions for this technique.
Quick test
you can use this action to check if the user action is installed and working: 1 / USER_CLIP(1) looplastbars --test
Actions
The basic action is called looplastbars for whole bars:
looplastbars 2 or
looplastbars 4 etc
or if you want to loop the amount of beats:
looplastbeats 7 or
looplastbeats 3 etc
If successfull it will rename the clip starting [altered clip looplength….. ], which stores the original loop information.
The action can only be applied if the loop has finished recording. The timing of this can be tricky, so I have coded an action which takes care of all that and will apply the action as soon as the recording is done:
loopwhenready or as a shorter version lwr, it takes one argument for the looplength. only digits are beats, if you add a b it will loop bars.
loopwhenready 2b or lwr 2b
for looping bars and
similar for beats:
loopwhenready 5 or lwr 5
as it is a user clip action a typical whole action would look like this:
2 / USER_CLIP(1) lwr 2b this applies to the clip in clip slot 1 on track 2. You can use any ClyphX action syntax like SEL for selected as well as variables.
SEL / USER_CLIP(SEL) lwr 1b or
%REC_TRACK% / USER_CLIP(%RECSLOT%) 4b if you previously defined the variables.
lastly there is a demo Ableton set, where I setup some demo actions: