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Roles
A role is what a scene is for — intro, verse, chorus, jam, ending. One role
per scene, written into the scene's own name as a bracketed tag:
[CHORUS] @Bm NIGHTFALL
A role says what a scene is. The song tag — {COVER} at the tail of
the same name — says what the whole song is. Two different questions, two different marks:
the role is a filled cell on the scene's own row, the tag an outlined pill on the song
header.
The set is the storage. That means a role travels with your .als, shows up in Live's
own scene column, and survives anything — there's no sidecar file to lose or to fall out
of sync.
Two ways in, and they write immediately.
From the grid. Every scene's cell in the Master column is its role. The role's color fills the cell edge to edge, the way a clip's color fills its slot, with the scene's launcher recessed on top of it — so a tagged scene reads as a slot with something in it. A scene with no role is a dim cell reading NONE, like an empty clip slot, and a role that has no color assigned takes a dashed outline. Click the label and the role menu opens right there. That matters because tagging is a pass down the grid: the cell you're reading is the cell you press, with no trip to the rail and back.
- Scope is that scene — unless it's already part of your scene selection, in which case it's the whole selection. The menu header says the count out loud either way, so it's never inferred.
- Esc closes the menu. It won't also stop your clips.
From the rail. Select scenes, and the scene panel's Role dropdown does the same job — with the chosen role's color beside it, and No role at the top of the list to take a tag off. Manage… sits next to it.
Either way, clicking a role writes it straight away. That only looks like it breaks the rule that naming needs a button. A role tag is additive — it goes on the front and leaves the rest of the name untouched — and the cell paints itself the moment it lands. There's nothing to preview. A title edit genuinely overwrites, which is why that half keeps its preview and its button.
To remove one, pick take the role tag off from the same menu.
Your roles and their colors are stored in the device, which means Live saves them into
your .als. The vocabulary travels with the set — through Save As, through a copy to the
gig laptop — with no sidecar file to lose or to fall out of sync. An older bsv.json is
imported once, the first time a device with nothing in it loads.
Open Set configuration with the gear in the main header, or use Manage… from the rail or the bottom of the role menu. They all open the same panel: the roles share their set-owned configuration with the default artist.
The list you see is your configured vocabulary unioned with every role actually tagged in the set. So a role someone typed straight into Live shows up here uncolored, rather than being invisible and then mysteriously coloring nothing.
[Chorus] and [chorus] are one role — case is folded, so a tag typed by hand in Live
and one written by the app don't become two entries with two colors.
Deleting a role only forgets its color. The scenes keep their tags, so it reappears in the list uncolored. The manager says so rather than letting you think it removed anything from your set.
With scenes selected, Color clips paints every clip in those scenes with its own scene's role color. One press works across a selection spanning several roles.
Role color reaches clips only. Beyond its own cell in the Master column it deliberately does not paint scene rows: those carry the song's color, and painting them per role would stripe a song into as many colors as it has sections — which is exactly what stops a hundred-song set being navigable. See Color.
Inside the band, role color reads as structure. That's the division of labour: the song is the block of color you find in Live's session view, and the roles are the shape inside it.
- As the cell on every scene row, in the Master column, painted its own color with the scene's launcher on top of it — so a column of roles reads as a column of filled slots.
- On a folded song header, as one slice per scene of the song, in order — so each track column is a miniature of that track's part in the song, and you can see where the pad enters rather than only that it's in the choruses. Color only, with the names and counts on hover. At a hundred folded songs, a word per role would turn a table of contents into a wall of text.
-
In Live, as
[CHORUS]at the front of the scene name.
On a folded header, a role with no color assigned draws as a hollow slice, and an untagged scene's clips get a neutral grey slice rather than nothing — a set mid-mapping is mostly untagged, and a track used only there still has to read as used. An empty clip slot draws nothing at all: an absence answers faster than a faint presence.