Re: AW: Foot timing, syncing loops with Ableton

[Mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 6:58 PM +0200 5/5/07, Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill wrote:
>
>Live with its lacking "first loop capability" (you need to set a tempo in
>advance) and the non-existent overdub function needs a dedicated looper - 
>in
>my case it's Mobius. Depending on the actual piece/work, I sync Live to
>Mobius or vice versa. Normally, I never record audio clips in Live, only
>MIDI stuff (and here, I also can overdub and replace as I choose), and do
>all audio looping stuff in Mobius.

Rainer,

(warning: largely-academic chatter ahead)

I've been working with a couple of people on the Ableton forums and 
trying to build a working MIDI Looper for Live.  While I haven't been 
able to solve the "first loop capability" problem, we did stumble 
upon a solution that *might* work to provide a limited overdub-like 
capability for Ableton.

For quite a while, I was overthinking the problem, and trying to come 
up with something overtly elegant (i.e. feeding the loop back into 
some structure over multiple iterations).  However, a dumb brute 
force method will work just as well.  Simply record a MIDI control 
track that is linked into Ableton's Utility widget.  Have the control 
track scale Utility's volume control over the course of "X" meaures. 
Set up each overdub on its own track (with the Utility plug), then 
assign that pre-recorded control track to the overdub.  It will scale 
the volume down to zero over the course of "X" measures, thus 
emulating standard feedback.

Biggest downside is that you need to come up with the number of 
measures you want to fade out across ahead of time (which, once 
again, is a big problem in so many aspects of Ableton).  Then you've 
got to make up a set of pre-recorded control tracks to handle various 
fade lengths (sort of like the pre-recorded loop thing we used to 
have to do with the Repeater).

(/largely-academic chatter)

On an only somewhat related note, however, I have been able to build 
a couple of working MIDI Loopers with Feedback inside Bidule (which 
kicks ass) and I'm yanking them around now to see what breaks.  Right 
now they work fine, but since they're based on a very long MIDI 
delay, you have to come up with a repeat length (in quarter notes) 
ahead of time -- just like an "audio delay line" Looper.  Next, I've 
got to figure out how to derive tempo from a Bidule widget, so I can 
solve the "first loop" problem and then drive Ableton from Bidule's 
MIDI clock.

Assuming I can actually program a nice working package, I'll post 
some links to the widgets if anybody else is interested.  FWIW, 
there's not much out there in the way of MIDI Looping....

        --m.