MIDI Looping - Some MIDI notes not playing in a clip

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alyerpal
Posts: 14
Joined: Sat Oct 30, 2004 3:49 am

MIDI Looping - Some MIDI notes not playing in a clip

Post by alyerpal » Sat Jul 08, 2006 2:41 am

Hi all,
I use LIVE primarily in live performance as a looper right now and I've recently discovered the virtues of looping MIDI Clips on the fly instead of looping Audio Clips. The MIDI Clips target soft synths (mostly Reason). I'm having fun exploring this method as now I can take advantage of tweaking the parameters on the synths in real time after the loop is recorded - fun & satisfying. Of course all the audio effects are still available, too!

There is one problem I've encountered with looping MIDI, that I hope someone could help me with...

An example - Let's say I play a chord right on the downbeat of a new MIDI Clip being recorded. If I play any MIDI notes even the teensiest bit before the start of recording (clip record is quantized to ONE BAR, btw), the heads of those notes land before the start of the loop (in Bar -1) and the notes will not be played again when recording stops & looping begins.

Here's an example, zoomed waaaaay in:
Image
When the MIDI clip starts looping the low note of the chord never plays back. :cry:

This seems to be standard in traditional MIDI sequencers (i.e., MIDI notes don't play at all unless playback goes across the heads of the notes), but LIVE is not a traditional sequencer! Especially with LIVE's non-linear, looping way of working it would be valuable to have these notes play, even though we're not triggering them from the beginning.

Basically I'm looking for a workaround or something I've missed in order to transfer my live performance method to looping MIDI instead of Audio. So, is there any way anyone can think of to get LIVE to trigger all MIDI notes that fall across the start of a clip, even if their heads are not at the start? Perhaps another way of looping MIDI so that this problem doesn't arise?

Tom B. Good
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 5:51 pm

Post by Tom B. Good » Tue Jul 25, 2006 5:06 am

Have you tried using MIDI record quantization? You could set it to something small, like 16th notes & that way even if you played a hair before the downbeat the heads of the notes would be exactly on the bar an that first note or chord of the clip would play every time.

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