Ableton Forum

Hi again,

I want to press a note on my midi keyboard once and have a rhythmic pattern play to a specific bpm. I know you echo, delay, and arpeggiate a sound, but I want the sound to be non-linear as in the video below.


Jump to 43 second mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5HsExAtjYg


I know you can create the chords using the chord midi tool in live, but is there some tool that can create that non linear pattern shown in the video??

Map scenes to MIDI notes ?

Scenes? What do you mean? I play keys live and each scene is a song. I must be misunderstanding you but how does mapping a scene to a midi key do anything?

For something like in the video you may either need a plug in, like xfer Cthulhu https://xferrecords.com/products/cthulhu (or there may be free arpeggiation plugins out there), or maybe some kind of Max for Live plugin. The Max route, I’m sure there are some either immediately searchable on the site or you’d have to be creative with using already existing devices. But the Cthulhu thing might be way easier of a solution (apparently there is a free trial).

There is a way to kind of do this with midi clips where you can do it on a single scene. But it does require some fiddling around, and some hard compromises. The technique would be to make a midi clip with the pattern and map the trigger of the clip to a Range of keys instead of a single key or button. This allows you to transpose that pattern. Little things to tidy that up would be to add a Scale device so the chord notes are in key (the compromise is that notes outside the scale probably can’t be done, plus you’d need to have something change the scale device at each new song), the other thing to tidy things up is setting the Clip Launch quantization to None (or a preferred quantization) and the launch mode to Momentary so it only triggers while the note is held down.

Hope these send you closer in the right direction. This particular feature and similar ones (like auto harmony type stuff) are great on workstation keyboards (even pretty basic keyboards) but unfortunately aren’t a strength in Ableton Live by default.