Please make MIDI looping work like Audio looping does.

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alyerpal
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Please make MIDI looping work like Audio looping does.

Post by alyerpal » Thu Aug 24, 2006 11:02 pm

PREMISE

There are a bunch of us who have gone from looping Audio clips live to looping MIDI clips live, because it opens up a whole world of sonic possibilities. You can tweak your soft synth's front panel after you loop, as well as still being able to manipulate all the audio effects you'd use if you were looping audio.


PROBLEM

There is one problem that we have all come up against in our migration from looping Audio clips to looping MIDI clips and that is - when looping MIDI, not all of the MIDI notes you record into a clip will play back, depending on the "feel" that you play with.


PROBLEM IN DEPTH

From a musical standpoint, sometimes you're going to play a hair before the beat, sometimes right on the beat, and sometimes a hair after the beat, depending on the feel of the backing tracks you're playing with. Now if you're looping audio, you can play behind the beat, on the beat, and ahead of the beat with no problem - all your audio will loop & play back properly. This is what we've all been doing up until this point.

Now that we're looping MIDI, though, you can play behind the beat & on the beat, but if you play ahead of the beat every bit of your MIDI loop will play *except* the MIDI notes whose heads land before 1.1.0.

Image

In this example the Bb and D of the Gm chord will not play back every time we loop to the start of the clip! Of course this is not the case if we loop audio. With audio we would hear the whole chord, granted it would be minus the tiny bits we played before 1.1.0, but those bits are inconsequential. (If they were played so early as to be a "pick up", they would've been played again at the end of the audio loop, where they would be heard.)

Of course we could record quantize the MIDI to solve this, but we've tried this and it absolutely kills the feel of the rest of the clip that you're recording, and we would all like the option of being able to record MIDI with record quantization off. This is the big issue.


PROPOSED SOLUTION

If an option for "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" could be added, that would truncate the heads of the early notes so that they would start at 1.1.0 and now be played back, that would be great!!! That would make live MIDI looping soooooooo much more viable for all us MIDI loopers.

We're thinking truncate vs. quantize those notes that land a hair before 1.1.0, since we don't necessesarily want to change the release time positions, and if we really want to quantize, we can still use the record quantize feature.

The same performance from above with "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" enabled would look like this:

Image


EXTRA CREDIT!

There is a thread on the forum discussing this,
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0
and another user (thanks glitchrock-buddha!) has suggested that the early bits of notes could be tacked onto the end of the loop, so that you actually do get your exact performance. This would be icing on the cake. If you could swing this, great, but even the truncation solution would put us MIDI loopers leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now.

Thanks for taking the time to read this through, and please, please, please consider implementing this soon!

Sincerely,
The Ableton LIVE MIDI Looping Squad

Johnisfaster
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Post by Johnisfaster » Fri Aug 25, 2006 3:03 am

seems like a bit too much info but this is a big + 1 for me.

it is a problem on more than just drums. if I want to lay some pads down in midi in a live looping way then anything on the downbeat may or may not get heard when it loops back around, I hate using the quantise, but I want that first note to make a sound eve if I accidently hit it a tad early.
It was as if someone shook up a 6 foot can of blood soda and suddenly popped the top.

eddu
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Post by eddu » Fri Aug 25, 2006 10:38 am

+1

Tom B. Good
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Post by Tom B. Good » Sat Aug 26, 2006 12:06 am

+1 here. I've stopped midi looping just because of this and would love to be able to go back.

hoffman2k
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Post by hoffman2k » Sat Aug 26, 2006 1:12 am

+1

This feature would also allow us to loop mono sounds without having the attack at every loop start...

vdrum
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Post by vdrum » Tue Aug 29, 2006 6:46 pm

I am one very nervous drummer when I do this sort of thing live! Please help me get off Xanan by implementing this GREAT idea!!

vD
eDrummer: Roland Vdrum kit Live 8/ MacBookPro 2.5 mhz & 2gb. Motu Ultralite.. Homemade midi-triggering pad for LIVE's filters , clips , & record buttons. Hopelessly hooked on live looping.

Angstrom
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Post by Angstrom » Tue Aug 29, 2006 7:00 pm

+1

Vlex
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Post by Vlex » Wed Aug 30, 2006 10:51 am

+1!

alyerpal
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More great stuff from The Ableton LIVE MIDI looping squad!

Post by alyerpal » Wed Aug 30, 2006 5:02 pm

jeremywen wrote:
What if they had an option to start recording as soon as it gets the first midi note on message? That would help. Or with audio, it could start as soon as it gets sound over a certain threshhold.

glitchrock-buddha wrote:
aha! Now there's an idea!

For midi, the recording could start when the first note is struck, then, it ends and loops exactly after a set number of bars, measured from the first note strike, rather than by the grid.

So, for example, if the recording length is set to four bars, when a note is struck early on the first downbeat, it begins recording there, and loops back that much earlier than the end of the fourth bar, staying in time. This achieves the same effect as what I had in mind earlier, which was moving the early note to the end of the recorded loop.

This way timing is preserved. I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to be forced to play on a grid as if it were quantized. I want the note to fall where I felt like playing it!
_________________

Johnisfaster
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Post by Johnisfaster » Thu Aug 31, 2006 10:22 am

personally I just want any early notes to be quantized to the downbeat while leaving all other notes untouched...
It was as if someone shook up a 6 foot can of blood soda and suddenly popped the top.

j0shu@
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Post by j0shu@ » Thu Sep 28, 2006 9:09 pm

+1

Calhoun
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Post by Calhoun » Fri Oct 27, 2006 11:03 pm

Big +1. Huge.

icedsushi
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Re: Please make MIDI looping work like Audio looping does.

Post by icedsushi » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:04 pm

Yes, I agree! But both of these solutions seem overly complicated to me from a technical standpoint.
alyerpal wrote: PROPOSED SOLUTION

If an option for "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" could be added, that would truncate the heads of the early notes so that they would start at 1.1.0 and now be played back, that would be great!!! That would make live MIDI looping soooooooo much more viable for all us MIDI loopers.

We're thinking truncate vs. quantize those notes that land a hair before 1.1.0, since we don't necessesarily want to change the release time positions, and if we really want to quantize, we can still use the record quantize feature.

The same performance from above with "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" enabled would look like this:

Image
This solution requires midi to be played outside of where the brackets are placed. Good idea for a solution but actually this is not how audio clips work. You are wanting the clip to play information that is not selected within the brackets, which is not so intuitive. The portion before beat one in an audio clip can be played at the end of the previous loop cycle. To make that even better for reverbs, delays, etc, silence can be added by moving the start point to the left of the left bracket.
alyerpal wrote: EXTRA CREDIT!

There is a thread on the forum discussing this,
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0
and another user (thanks glitchrock-buddha!) has suggested that the early bits of notes could be tacked onto the end of the loop, so that you actually do get your exact performance. This would be icing on the cake. If you could swing this, great, but even the truncation solution would put us MIDI loopers leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now.
This is a little better because you are only asking the midi notes within the loop brackets be played, but why go through the extra step and complication of having things moved around for you. For you live loopers out there...in this solution, the first repeat of early midi notes can't be played at the end of the bar because the loop hasn't reached the end of it's first cycle yet.

I've thought about this issue a lot and keep coming to the same conclusion. Since my first looping of midi clips, here's what intuitively I've always expected to happen:

If the option existed to "connect and sustain" identical midi notes which touch the loop brackets at both ends, the note(s) would be anticipated at the end of each loop cycle and have the original feel without retriggering the note(s).

There could be a "midi loop" button where you could select either "retrigger" or "sustain". It would work for live looping as well if you continue to play through the downbeat of the next measure where clip recording stops.

davec1
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Post by davec1 » Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:19 pm

I like the quantise first note to downbeat approach.

but no matter how exactly, a big

+1 here!

kineticUk
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Post by kineticUk » Tue Oct 31, 2006 1:00 am

I agree
+1
MacBook MacOS Live 9.7.1 Max for Live Push Logic

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