Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info

[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

Re: Using computers as a Live Looper - software alternatives




Michael Stauffer writes:

> You can simulate overdubbing by switching and
> recording on different tracks in Ableton live,
> although the midi controller mappings are not
> currently designed efficiently for this.
> ...
> For working with 10 tracks, you need at least
> 30 controllers to be effective.
> ...
> Anyone have any other ideas?

I've been doing live looping with Ableton Live
onstage since early November. I'm making use
of a Windows utility called MIDI Translator,
which translates MIDI events into any sequence
of keystrokes you want.

In Live, I've got lots of tracks' worth of buttons
(arm-disarm, trigger-launch, etc.) assigned to
unique keystrokes -- almost to the point where
I max out the 52 characters in the upper- and
lower-case alphabets! Then for each song I do,
I have an associated set of mappings in MIDI
Translator that translate the MIDI events coming
from my foot controller (Ground Control Pro) into
keystrokes.

So, for example, in a certain song, button #1 on
my GCP feeds Live the following keystroke
sequence: "Ctrl-1 k K Z R l q a", which sets the
quantization, arms a track or two, sets the first
track to record, etc.

It's a kludge, certainly, and not very fault-tolerant --
when I hit the wrong button on stage, all sorts of
unintended things happen -- but it does the job.

MIDI Translator can be found at http://www.bome.com .


Andrew Chaikin, aka Kid Beyond
andrew@biggerbread.com
(415) 929-8822

http://biggerbread.com | http://kidbeyond.com