Ableton Forum

any possibility of this being a feature in version 7?

I just discovered that Live doesn't record aftertouch, also it cannot thru the message to an instrument. I though first that my VFX was malfunctionning...

It's really strange and bad.

So +1 to add this (better in 6).

I've been reading through the forums again and again, and it really does seem like Live completely ignores polyphonic aftertouch messages.

This is really strange and bad, since Roland V-Drums use polyphonic aftertouch messages to handle cymbal chokes.

What strikes me even weirder is that it apparently polyphonic key pressure (aftertouch) has been part of the official MIDI standard since '99, and it is absolutely trivial to implement basic support for it:

http://www.midi.org/about-midi/ca22.pdf


(this should've been part of my .signature):
Live is hands-down the best sequencer I've had the pleasure to use - and I mainly play and record punk/hardcore/metal, so any huff about live being techno-tool only is FUD.


EDIT: this feature is not in Live 7, either.

+1 I need it too!

and I also find it mysterious that Sampler appears to support it, along with other modulators.

+ 1

+ 1

+1,000,001

+1

+1

I've payed a lot of money for a 88 key poly aftertouch keyboard and now Ableton Live doesn't seem to support it.

That is sad! Please add support for this!

Doc Jones wrote:any possibility of this being a feature in version 7?

any possibility of this being a feature in version 8?

Koston wrote: What strikes me even weirder is that it apparently polyphonic key pressure (aftertouch) has been part of the official MIDI standard since '99, and it is absolutely trivial to implement basic support for it:

Both channel and polyphonic after touch have been in the MIDI standard since MIDI was invented back in the early eighties.

And your right there is no good reason why Live should not respond to it.

I have been periodically polling the Ableton support for plans to implement polyphonic aftertouch, and the current status is "not planned".

Most likely the reason for this is that there are only a handful of (very expensive) synths which use this feature, and there aren't very many e-drummers around either, at least using Live. To top it off, polyphonic aftertouch is - or so I've read - a slightly problematic standard for producing such vast amounts of data in a small-bandwidth protocol.

I just received my Superior Drummer 2.0, and it came along with a dedicated light-weight host to drive it with. Since it supports key aftertouch, I can fairly easily work around Live's lack of support for it by eg. playing through the stand-alone instrument while recording just MIDI data to Ableton, and manually inserting cymbal chokes where appropriate. If I desperately needed a reference for the chokes, I can route audio output from the stand-alone plugin to Live (by physically routing it out and back in again, at least).

At any rate, I would tend to agree - if my assumption is correct - that there are higher priority issues to deal with for Live 8, such as proper crossfade support and track comping support like in Digital Performer 6.

I'm still very positively surprised to see how fast Ableton manages to come out with excellent code and truly innovative features, and it's quite unlikely that a single DAW would ever be best at everything.

However, something that might be worth considering for Ableton would be grabbing the MIDI Patchbay http://notahat.com/midi_patchbay code (since it's MIT licenced 'n everything), abletonize it's visual appearance and integrate it into Live. While at it, perhaps they could compliment the codebase with CC and Poly Aftertouch support..

Koston wrote:I have been periodically polling the Ableton support for plans to implement polyphonic aftertouch, and the current status is "not planned".

Well, that's a bummer, but a least we now know.
thanks for the info Koston.