Triggering sounds w/ violin?

[headfullofradios]

Hey,

New user here , but have some solid experience with Ableton Live for sketching ideas. I now want to implement it into my live looping performance with violin, using the Mobius 2 plugin.

I would like to apply effects before the looper, so I'm thinking I will have one audio track with switchable effects and then route that to a separate track for the looper to record and playback. I haven't yet jumped in, but I wouldn't mind some tips.

I just thought though, what if I don't simply want an effect, but I want a completely different sound.. Is there a way to use a gate effect to trigger a square wave (or a ringmod) with audio input and some sort of translation of pitch to midi note? I'd rather not be using midi pickups because they seem excessive and expensive. I'm going for a mostly acoustic sound with the occasional analog synth burst.

[infernal.machine]

I would recommend you get some sort of foot trigger/pedal/board, and use it to control effects as you play. I've found this to give endless options for playing expressively and gives you the most control without getting distracted.

You can convert audio to MIDI in reaper, send the MIDI to live, and use that to control a MIDI instrument, but it's really more trouble than it's worth. Latency is a huge issue and also the notes are quantized to half steps. I haven't found a better method of converting audio to MIDI in real time, so I'm interested if anyone else has any ideas.

[headfullofradios]

thanks for the input. I have a FCB1010 foot controller w/ expression pedals, and I figured out how to approximate a square wave with overdrive and cascading filters, one of which is LFO modulated to create a nice wobble. I'm just gonna mess with effects until I find something I like.

I didn't know Reaper had that ability; won't Live 9 also have Audio to MIDI capability? and is that just going to be a contextual command or a real-time calculation?

[infernal.machine]

L9's audio to MIDI isn't real time. And so far I am not very impressed with it at all...

[regretfullySaid]

You can use the Live's Vocoder to "track" your violin pitch.

• Pitch Tracking enables a monophonic oscillator, which tunes itself to the pitch of the
modulator. The High and Low sliders allow you to limit the frequency range that the
oscillator will attempt to track. Choose from sawtooth or one of three pulse waveforms
and adjust the coarse tuning of the oscillator via the Pitch slider. Pitch tracking is
particularly effective with monophonic modulator sources such as melodic instruments
or voices. Note that the oscillator only updates its frequency when it detects a clear
pitch. It then maintains this pitch until it detects a new one. This means that changing
the oscillator’s parameters or causing it to reset (when grouping Vocoder’s track, for
example) can cause unexpected changes in the sound. With polyphonic material

It works pretty well. You'll still have to fiddle with some other settings to get it better. Don't overlook some settings in the middle window (like Semitone to up the octave iirc)

[Vios]

You could use a sidechained gate on a operator, set for a square wave output. Than you could use Pitch to MIDI Vst. I've heard Melodyne will do this, but there are also plugins like this around: http://www.knzaudio.com/index.php?midifier.