What locators do in Ableton Live and how to place them

The locator lane runs across the top of the Arrangement, between the time ruler and the first track. It stays empty until you put something in it, which is why people who have used Live for years sometimes have not noticed it is there. The controls for it sit in the upper right-hand corner of the Arrangement view: a Set button with an arrow on either side.

Set places a locator at the current position, and which position that is depends on the transport. Stopped, it uses the insert marker — the line you left behind by clicking in a track or on the ruler. Running, it uses the playhead, so you can mark transitions as you listen rather than hunting for them afterwards. A locator set while the transport runs is quantised to the global quantisation value in the control bar, so with that set to a bar the marker lands on a bar line rather than exactly where you pressed it.

The same command sits in the Create menu as Add Locator. That menu is also the honest place to look for a keyboard shortcut: Live prints the binding beside the command, and Ableton has moved key assignments between releases, so what your install does is more reliable than a list written for someone else's version.

Session view has none of this. Locators are a timeline feature and Session view has no timeline — it has scenes, which are rows of clips you launch rather than points in a recording. If your set lives in Session, arm the Arrangement record button and play it through once. What you capture is an arrangement, with a lane above it to mark up.

A new locator arrives with a generic name and a number. Right-click it and choose Rename, or select it and press Ctrl+R — Cmd+R on a Mac — which is the same rename shortcut Live uses for tracks and clips. Type over what is there and press Enter. The name is the only part of a locator you can edit by typing; the position is a drag.

A locator belongs to the set rather than to a track, which matters while you are still rearranging. Mute the track underneath it, delete that track, or move its clips somewhere else entirely, and the marker stays where it was. What you typed is stored in the .als alongside the position, so a set copied to another machine carries its markers with it. Turning those stored positions into minutes and seconds is a separate problem, because Live records them in beats rather than seconds — the Ableton tracklist page goes through what that does to the times.

With the transport stopped, a locator goes where the insert marker is, and the insert marker obeys the Arrangement grid. The grid is a setting on the Arrangement rather than a property of the locator, so whatever division is showing is what your marker gets. On a one-bar grid, a click halfway through bar 33 becomes a locator at bar 33. For a mix built from beatmatched tracks that is usually what you wanted, since the transition sits on a bar line anyway and snapping keeps a run of markers tidy.

When you need one exactly where you clicked, change the grid rather than hunting for a locator setting. Right-click anywhere in the Arrangement and the grid options are in that menu, Off among them. Holding Alt on Windows, or Cmd on a Mac, suspends snapping for a single drag if you would rather leave the setting alone. Off-grid is the right choice for anything that does not begin on the beat: a spoken intro, an unquantised opening, the moment a video edit has to cut.

Moving a locator afterwards is a drag along the lane, and the drag obeys the same grid. Deleting is a click on the locator and then Delete, which removes the marker and nothing else. Editing the arrangement is a different matter. Insert or delete time and every locator past the edit moves with the music, which is correct behaviour and easy to mistake for markers going missing.

The arrows either side of the Set button move the playhead to the previous or next locator, and clicking a locator jumps straight to it. During playback that jump follows global quantisation, so the transport waits for the next bar instead of cutting mid-phrase. Set global quantisation to None and it moves the instant you click, which is what you want while checking whether a marker landed where you meant it to. Put it back afterwards, because the same setting governs clip launching.

Locators can be key-mapped and MIDI-mapped, which turns the lane into cue points you can fire from a controller or the computer keyboard. Right-clicking one offers two more things worth knowing. Loop To Next Locator brackets the section between this marker and the next, which is the quickest way to audition a single transition. Set Song Start Time Here makes playback begin at that marker rather than at the top of the arrangement.