Ableton Live

[Zifor]

not sure if its been mentioned on this thread but max are doing a sale due to the ableton 11. I am going to get it at the end of the month , to make more midi interfaces for my cc gear

[SYS2064]

I don’t see a reason why MIDI tracks still wouldn’t have a MIDI volume fader, from my point of view it’s ridiculous.
For example, I grouped in a Group track the 6 Elektron Monomachine’s tracks; on the Monomachine, instead of the individuals outputs I have to use the stereo output, so I have to use just 1 External Instrument device that I added to track 1, tracks 2-6 are simple midi tracks that send and receive data to and from each MnM’s track.
well, now I would like control the volume of each MnM’s track via the pots on Push 2 but it’s impossibile, i’m able to control only the audio volume that comes from the stereo output ad it is absurd for a DAW like Live.

[DMR]

I don’t have a Push or a Monomachine, but couldn’t you use an Instrument Rack to contain all of your MIDI sequencing channels, and then map the Instrument Rack macro knobs to MIDI volume for each of the 6 channels within the Rack?

[madeofoak]

i was on a zoom call with ableton a&r reps a couple days ago, and just wanted to say that one huge new feature was phase locked linked warping. kind of hand in hand with the comping (and group linked comping) they also allow you to simultaneously warp linked tracks. haven’t used the beta yet but the demo they gave us made it seem pretty effortless to (finally) warp multi track drum recordings all together.

[robotboot]

Best way to use external midi is to use the “External Instrument” plugin which lets each track have its own native fader but since you are using a machine that had lots of tracks within its 2 outputs you need to find the CC’s for the track volumes if it is has one or use the “Velocity” Midi Effect and map the out Hi to a macro as your volume. You could create the macros on one track so when you click on the one track your midi volume mixing will show up but they won’t ever be sliders or show up in the overall mixing area. Im not sure what daw has a midi volume slider? If you had an interface and ran each of the Monomachine’s outputs into it you would have sliders for each channel.

[healthylives]

Would the J74 morph tools be helpful here? http://fabriziopoce.com/morph.html

[jkile9]

This is one of the bigger additions for me. I use Ableton for my own personal more electronic stuff as well as my bands multi track recording and having just finished recording an album and having to manually warp each drum track equally, this would have been a godsend.

[LLK]

@robotboot

Im not sure what daw has a midi volume slider?

I’m confused as well since midi by definition has no volume. If it’s a matter of mapping a cc to the volume slider of each track it’s easy. If it’s a matter of having each track generate different volume, that’s the role of velocity (if velocity is mapped to volume level which it traditionally is). So yeah I’m a bit confused and I think it would help if @SYS2064 could tell us the DAW that has the behavior he’s looking for so we could look for the best way to emulate in Ableton because I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be complicated.

[Xylr]

That looks interesting. The Voices setting on simpler isn’t midi assignable… I’ve never used it but it appears that the Morph device saves states as recallable presets… so… maybe you could have preset configurations at different macro regions to change the number of voices. I wonder though if it would necessitate changing other settings within the device (sample start, sample length) when the preset switches… do you have Morph? Any idea? Either way, seems like a cool tool. Thanks.

[MWAU]

I’m on the waiting list to try the new beta (current 10 suite owner). Can anyone confirm whether the new MPE is able to neatly send MPE data out from one midi track? i get that it works if you drop an MPE compatible plugin on the track it works (e.g. wavetable, Roli Equator etc.) but if i’m sending MPE midi to an external synth (or, for example my Kyma system) how would I do that (currently, Ableton 10 forces you to choose one midi channel).

[FLORINS]

If it works well this would honestly be an edge over Pro Tools for some editing tasks. The Pro Tools multitrack warp (elastic audio) I find is often not phase coherent (depending on the material and algorithm you’re using).

[LLK]

Agreed it’s a problem I’ve encountered (to the point of not using warping for any multi mic setups as a general rule not to bother with such things). I use Ableton and PT for very different tasks but having that issue lifted could actually help generate some crazy creative workflows for multi mic acoustic takes making them more feel like single audio samples and that’s great news.

[Deru]

I’ve been curious to dig into the details on how Live 11 will handle multichannel MIDI from one track as well. I haven’t had the time to properly investigate (or find docs on it for that matter), but to answer your question, it seems that they have included sending MPE data out of Live:

In quickly testing it I get consistent stuck note-on’s, but I haven’t had much time to make conclusions yet.

My concern with Live’s implementation is the same as with Bitwigs, in that the channel assignments are done automatically and behind the scenes, which can lead to some limitations and confusion. My favorite implementation remains Cubase, where I can assign a MIDI channel to each note and manually change them if I want and need, and know that the MIDI channels I send in will be recorded and sent out the same way. My feeling is that Ableton will strip those channel assignments and reassign them automatically but I haven’t been able to test that yet so we’ll see.

Anyway, more testing to be done. I do wish that they would expose a MIDI-Channel setting per note, but lmk if anyone has dug into this aspect more. The jury’s still out for me.

[FLORINS]

I did a couple projects where I tried relying on Elastic Audio in Pro Tools for drum editing instead of usual cut and drag/Beat Detective. Needless to say I’m back to cut and drag for most multi-mic stuff - but if Ableton can nail multi-channel warping and now with the comping feature I could actually imagine trying to do some editing in it that I would normally only do in PT.

[MWAU]

Thanks! I’ll explore once I get my beta. I must be honest, I’ve been sorely tempt to leave Ableton for Cubase for a while (especially as my ‘creativity’ tends to happen in Kyma these days not Ableton) so really I just want a good DAW for editing. If Ableton still haven’t quite got MPE right (agree, Cubase is great for it!) then this may be deciding factor. Time will tell I guess.

[Markus]

Stuck notes usually happen when sending mpe to a non mpe device. I had that a couple of times in the past.
Re mpe implementation: have only tested it for a couple of hours with my kijimi (external, worked great) and a couple of plugins (surge didn’t work so well, the roli thing did work fine, quanta as well). All tested with a seaboard rise 25.
There’s a few videos of live 11 and mpe as well as website showing the features.
Re your question: do I understand correctly that you wanna know if you can influence the base channel?

[MWAU]

Proper MPE implementation should allow you to specify the polyphony, so that notes wrap back round again on midi channels.

[hyena]

because there isn’t something as midi volume.
in fact in general midi control change number 7 is usually defined as VOLUME, but then it’s up to the manufacturer of the midi equipped instrument wether to use it by default, have it as an option or totally ignore it.
also keep in mind that with midi cc’s you have a resolution of just 128 values, not really great for fader movements unless some kind of upsampling\interpolation takes place.
anyway as someone already pointed out, the best practice is to use External Instrument devices for your external gear, mainly because so you can use just one track instead of two (one midi track for sending midi data to the instrument, one audio track for receiving it’s output). then you can do proper volume automations on the track’s fader (which of course is higher resolution than 128 values).
if you then want to have it as audio, you just freeze and flatten the track with the external instrument device and it bounces that in place (in real time of course, having to actually record it).

[RPLKTR]

@MWAU

Proper MPE implementation should allow you to specify the polyphony, so that notes wrap back round again on midi channels.

This is correct. Example from the spec:

@hyena

also keep in mind that with midi cc’s you have a resolution of just 128 values, not really great for fader movements unless some kind of upsampling\interpolation takes place.

That is not entirely true. Many CC numbers also provide another 7 bits of resolution in the form of the LSB (least significant byte). The list is in the spec. For example mod wheel MSB is CC1 whereas its LSB is CC33. 16384 values are enough resolution, giving you more than 100 values per semitone when split over 10 octaves.

Many manufacturers ignore LSB messages because they are tricky to deal with (Should you always wait for a pair and time out on non-received LSB? Which one in a pair should come first?) and DAWs like Ableton Live don’t combine them in the UI, making truly smooth transitions tricky to sequence anyway unless recorded from a compatible controller.

[Deru]

@Markus

Stuck notes usually happen when sending mpe to a non mpe device. I had that a couple of times in the past.

I was sending to an MPE device.

Re mpe implementation: have only tested it for a couple of hours with my kijimi (external, worked great) and a couple of plugins (surge didn’t work so well, the roli thing did work fine, quanta as well). All tested with a seaboard rise 25.

I guess what I’m talking about might be a gray area between ‘multichannel MIDI’ and the finalized MPE spec. There are times when multichannel MIDI is useful (even with poly pitchbend and CC’s) but you don’t need to fit with the MPE spec because it will be used for specific purposes. A simple example is something like the Vermona PerFOURmer that has 4 voices that can be addressed by 4 assignable MIDI channels. Each voice can respond to pitchbend and aftertouch, so it is close to the MIDI spec, but it can use channel 1 (there is no global channel) and it only has 4 channels. Each voice can have individual pan, pitch, filter, etc, so being able to send specific notes to specific voices is sometimes desirable. I guess in Live the way this would need to be handled is by using 4 different tracks? That’s kind of a drag in terms of workflow and editing. There are workarounds no doubt but my point is that by not allowing manual channel assignments can be limiting.

I also often send MID out of a DAW into Max/MSP where I decode the MIDI by channel and can route as needed. This all gets a bit specific but lmk if you’d like me to explain.

There’s a few videos of live 11 and mpe as well as website showing the features.

If you’ve seen any in depth ones that talk about the channel assignments lmk!

PS: From my testing Ableton seems to strip incoming MIDI notes of their channel data and reassigns each note’s channel in ascending order. So the same MIDI clip will have different channel assignments on every playback. This is unfortunate imo.