[less concepts]: max for live

[yghartsyrt]

yeah. Great. This works. thanks!

[kuntaise]

couldn’t make it work, can someone please help?
I place lc on a channel, and open a midi instrument in an other one. I couldn’t make less concepts trigger the midi. Also when I press play, there is no midi coming out of lc. How is the most basic way to get sound out of it.

[dan_derks]

hey! sorry to hear about the trouble. less concepts starts in a 0-state, so it won’t generate any notes unless some decisions are made first.

@kuntaise

the most basic way to get sound out of it

try this:

• set rule: 30
• set seed: 36
• press play on Live’s transport

you’ll see 1’s and 0’s streaming through the interface – 1’s are notes, 0’s are rests.

• set v1 bit to one of the bits; left to right is 8 to 1
• set v2 bit to another one of the bits

like this:

that’s the most straightforward way to get immediate sound. from there, play with different rules + seeds, different bits, octaves, scales, clock settings, etc

hope this helps!

[dan_derks]

less concepts v1.3: lc joins the smartphone network

i’ve been inspired by @rjonline00’s devices for months. using local send/receive pulse networks with simple text identifiers, they form a paradigm that he describes as “action-based sequencing.” move a fader which triggers a pulse to another device that determines a pitch, or one that kicks off a slow-moving slewed slider, or one that send a burst of pulses in response.

a few weeks ago i introduced a [phone] clock source to integrate less concepts into this network – jr took that and ran and made lil concepts (all the smartphones are super tiny):

with his blessing, i pulled his changes into the larger concepts, which has now been released with an updated manual.

maybe a livestream or some video tutorials are on the horizon? until then, i’d highly recommend jr’s insanely cool video on youtube:

Rack #2 (hiking)

[rjonline00]

I have been using this for Everything! The way you can get so many recallable variations of a pattern is so useful. It’s like controlled infinity afaict. Thanks so much for letting me mess with it:)

[tjdumser]

Hi all, wondering if you can help me shed some light on an issue I seem to be having.

When I try to open a Live session that I’ve used the LC device in, Ableton crashes upon loading. But if I open Live first and then open the session with LC, it loads just fine. I had LC in my template session so every time I was opening Live it was crashing. Once I removed it from my template Live loads a new session just fine.

I’m on macOS 10.14.6, Ableton Live 10.1.30, and running LC v1.3

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

[dan_derks]

hey! sorry to hear about the trouble. not able to repro on MacOS 10.15.7, Live 10.1.30 and LC 1.3 – i’m curious if a clean install of max + pointing Live to use the fresh install does the trick? otherwise, feel free to pass me your MacOS crash reports in DM

[tjdumser]

Hey Dan,

Cool, Yeah, I wonder if it’s inevitable for me to jump to Catalina. Once LC is open and running everything is all great! Sure, I can DM you a crash log. Standby.

[Myles_Avery]

This happens in Live sometimes regardless of Max devices, just a bug I think. A kind of annoying one at that

[tjdumser]

Hey again, I don’t want to burden you with the crash log since it’s likely not related solely to LC. I just did a test with another Live device and blam, same crash. It appears I’ve got a nice Christmas chore list to bang through. Thank you again for the willingness to help and for the quick response! LOVE playing with it.

[tjdumser]

Hmm, yeah, it appears you’re correct as I was able to repro it with another Live device…bummer…Thank you for the response!

[nattog]

Does anyone notice some rhythmic digital noise/glitches in audio when running less concepts v1.3? Had it happen to me, and managed to isolate the root cause down to lc.

Can reproduce by:

1. starting a new Live project
2. creating a midi clip sending output to a hardware synth
3. monitoring its audio in an audio track - sounds fine
4. adds less concepts - glitches start to appear
5. mutes lc - glitches stop

it could be my slightly worse for wear old mac that’s starting to struggle, although here CPU is running at 4%.

[dan_derks]

thank you for the report + sorry to hear about the trouble! if you’re able, could you share a clip of the audio so i know what i’m looking for when i test tomorrow?

a repro Live Set would also be – I just want to make sure I’m getting the exact setup (eg. I’m not totally sure if the ‘creating a midi clip’ step means running a clip with MIDI data at the same time as LC)

[nattog]

Here’s a repro Live set - I tried to keep it clear using the locators on the timeline to show steps - hope it makes sense to you. The issue happens for me when using Ableton’s stock synths as well so it made it easier to create a demonstration. I will work on getting a clip of the audio that demonstrates this - it doesn’t seem to get baked into the audio I’m recording, fortunately. Easier to hear with headphones too I found.

lc_glitch_troubleshooting Project.zip (3.9 MB)

[dan_derks]

thank you!
hmm. not getting anything too weird (excepting that two streams of the same audio signal are being passed through). this is a recording from my computer’s headphone output into an external recorder:

possibly unrelated, but i wonder if you experience the same trouble if you place Ableton’s Note Length device in after LC?

[nattog]

Your reply made me think to try listening to the computer’s headphone output as opposed to through my audio interface - and I’m not getting the same results (sounds identical to yours here). Pretty consistently getting the glitch sound through my Fireface UC interface (annoying if it’s this which is starting to play up!).
Managed to capture the sounds, quite audible around the 9-second mark

Note Length device after LC has the same effect. Guess it must be an issue with my Fireface since it only is reproducible with this!

[dan_derks]

oooooh, weiiiird. i haven’t used an interface in a long while, oddly – i wonder if there’s a firmware update available or if the sample rate between your computer + interface got mismatched? sorry to hear about the trouble, please lmk what you find out!

[nattog]

Thanks for looking into it, and sorry for the false alert! It’s not a sample rate mismatch, and i’ll have to double check the firmware. Will report back if i figure it out!

[zebra]

it looks like buffer underruns to me

that’s a 80-something-samples chunk of silence.

try increasing whatever setting is responsible for midi+audio rendering buffer size. (i’ve no idea how this works these days in live/m4l.)

[nattog]

@zebra

try increasing whatever setting is responsible for midi+audio rendering buffer size. (i’ve no idea how this works these days in live/m4l.)

that solved it - thanks for investigating. weird, I was certain i had checked that but clearly not. sorry for the noise!