#1

I’ve been using a small modular system for making some quick patches in between getting home from work and going to bed (narrow window) and if I hit on something interesting I’ll record a clip into ableton. I end up with clips with fairly consistent tempo’s (coming from a clock source in the modular) but… the clips will often have very little obvious transient content and will maybe be ‘confused’ by lots of other things going on. I want use the clips in ableton later on but warping stuff like this effectively is difficult for me (switched from logic last year). I have a midi-cv converter for clock out of ableton but this means setting something else up in the middle of the process and often stopping and starting the patch will change it (phases change etc). I could setup midi-cv as default every time I patch but more setup slows everything down for me in my stolen music moments before sleep (I also barely have space for a guitar pedal so space is premium). Since I’m recording anyway I’d love to be able to mult the clock I’m using into an audio input, let it set abletons tap temp and be good to go (I guess for a pretty long while before drift makes a difference). I’ve tried using an ableton device called peaks but couldn’t get it working to tap tempo, maybe theres a bpm counter that’d work better than tap. Anyone have any ideas on a stable way to do this, it’d help a lot, I’m probably missing something super obvious.
Thanks

#2

it sounds like you don’t need it to happen live, which means you could just use ableton’s warp function to suss out the bpm of the clock signal after the fact. if you want it to happen in real time and record to a grid on the fly you could use beat seeker - https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/beatseeker/
not free, but i use it all the time to sync my laptop and modular to incoming audio from other musicians. not perfect but the best one i’ve found. would work very well with a multed clock signal.

#3

Ah, yes, record some of the gates/trigs, switch inputs (I only have 2ins), carry on recording, let it record my loop where it’s less obvious where the transients are, then use the recorded gates to figure out the tempo with warping later on. I knew I was missing an obvious workaround, I’ll blame the commute induced weariness. How long do you think I’d have with something like the clock from an intellijel noise tools before drift made a difference? I guess I’ll know soon enough. Sometimes i set record and cut a nice little loop out of a 30 min recording. I’ll check out beatseeker, I’d love to be able to sync machines to live performances more easily. Thanks