Are MIDI Capabilities OK or Weak?

[Chrisk-K]

I've been a hardware sequencer guy for a long time and want to move to a PC-based DAW. I primarily record external synths and soft synths, so MIDI tools are important to me. I just need usual MIDI tools offered in hardware sequencers; quantize, swing quantize, velocity editing, various CC tools (insert or assign CC messages), multi-track MIDI editing, etc. How easy is it to use these MIDI tools in Ableton Live? Is it true that Live cannot record and transmit sysex? I love the GUI of Live and the idea of MIDI capture, so hopefully Live will work out for me. Cheers.

[TLW]

To work with sysex in Live you need Max4Live. Even then it wouldn’t be my first choice for handling sysex, I tend to use other applications for that.

Live’s basic sequencers are pretty much the same as most DAWs provide, but there are also things like Turing machine based sequencers and various probability based ones available. Again, Max4Live is needed for the “cleverer” stuff, some of which is third party but M4L devices tend to be free or cheap.

Overall Live handles MIDI well, my biggest gripe is it can’t handle MIDI beyond 7 bit standard as easily as say Sonar could/does, rather than merging the MSB and LEB into a single numeric value it handles them as two separate values. One advantage Live has over Logic Pro is that Live differentiates between MIDI hardware ports as well as channels, which is useful if you have more than one device fixed by the manufacturer to the same channel.

Live, like most/all(?) DAWs does have the disadvantage compared to hardware sequencing that it’s somewhere between tricky and impossible to make changes “on the fly” as a sequencer runs in the way you can with many hardware sequencers. Which is why my Dark Times, Drum Brute Impact, SQ-1 and Beatstep Pro are still my “go to” sequencers. For pre-programmed sequencing Live is as good as any software bar sequencers like Thesys and Quantum, which I usually run on an iPad connected to Live.

[jlgrimes]

I've been a hardware sequencer guy for a long time and want to move to a PC-based DAW. I primarily record external synths and soft synths, so MIDI tools are important to me. I just need usual MIDI tools offered in hardware sequencers; quantize, swing quantize, velocity editing, various CC tools (insert or assign CC messages), multi-track MIDI editing, etc. How easy is it to use these MIDI tools in Ableton Live? Is it true that Live cannot record and transmit sysex? I love the GUI of Live and the idea of MIDI capture, so hopefully Live will work out for me. Cheers.

Depending on what you are doing and workflow I'd say Ableton's Midi can range from OK to Excellent.

Ableton gets alot of flak for having a weak piano roll and it does have some weaknesses there (no chord/scale tools, no razor tools, no glue tools), but on the flip side of things I think Ableton has one of the most pleasing piano Rolls in the business. Simple to remember shortcuts, Shortcuts for changing grid size, draw tools, a comprehensive midi envelope editor, great clip looping commands. Ableton also makes it pretty easy to record and capture your ideas down. To me though Ableton has somewhat of a hardware sequencer "feel" to it versus a "traditional" DAW and this is probably some of the creators intent especially when combined with Push. And Ableton also comes with pretty good midi effects like Arps, Transpose and what not.


I would say it weakness are the following:

1. Probably not the best piano roll for drawing in Chords/Scales (although its probably not the worst either).
2. Record Quantization is only destructive (no way to get back to your original timing if you use Session View). Other DAWs such as Studio One and even Reaper have more extensive control here.
3. Groove Quantize while nice has no way of "looking" at the swing with the piano roll (or at least an elegant way of doing this) as certain DAWs can have groove gridlines shown.
4. No eventlist View (although I never used this in any DAW that had this although some people swear by this).
5. No Notation View
6. No easy way to do tuplets and weird durations (although there are some decent workarounds here).

[Chrisk-K]

Thanks for the replies! I've been reading the manual and playing around with the trial version. One MIDI-related thing that I haven't figured out is as follows. There seems to be no easy way to insert MIDI CC messages on a track (e.g., insert Modulation = 0 and Pitch Bend = 0 at the beginning of a song). Am I missing something? Is this kind of thing done by "automation"? Cheers.

[jlgrimes]

Thanks for the replies! I've been reading the manual and playing around with the trial version. One MIDI-related thing that I haven't figured out is as follows. There seems to be no easy way to insert MIDI CC messages on a track (e.g., insert Modulation = 0 and Pitch Bend = 0 at the beginning of a song). Am I missing something? Is this kind of thing done by "automation"? Cheers.

I would believe you would need to create an automation envelope.

Much of Abletons, controller editing is envelope based.

[timday]

cc messages for e.g hardware synths tend to live in the clips.

In most DAWs there is in clip automation which tends to be GM compliant and/or relate to native plugs and the mixer. Then there are automation lanes in the arrange view which tend to be for everything else (mixer settings again, native plugins again, and VST/AU). You should probably make sure you get a handle on both as it can be confusing. Both get referred to as "automation" but they don't work in quite the same way. The easiest way to set say a mod wheel to 0 at the start of a track would be in a MIDI clip as an envelope breakpoint.


I should say one really big thing for me for hardware synths is that if they are MIDI controllable, it's not hard to make a Max controller to easily control the MIDI functions from the DAW. So easy in fact that often you go on Max4live.com and find that someone has already done it for you. Sometimes that person is even the manufacturer. There are also free Max devices such as 8cc or control change 8 that let you quickly assign visually easy to use dials to external cc sends. For me these are an absolute must for controlling hardware and it's a deal breaker for other DAWs that they don't have them.