Pitch midi effect skipping values

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ChaseBowman
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Joined: Fri Jan 16, 2015 7:28 pm

Pitch midi effect skipping values

Post by ChaseBowman » Wed May 25, 2022 5:17 pm

Hi everyone,

I'm having a problem with an instrument rack in Ableton 11.15 on Mac.

Im using the Pitch device, which transposes midi by semitones. It's single dial works fine when in an instrument rack, however, when I map the dial to a macro, it immediately skips numbers... so 0, -2, -4, -6, etc if rotating down, instead of 0, -1, -2, -3, -4, etc...

I have no idea why this is happening when the dial is mapped in an instrument rack. Any ideas appreciated...

siliconarc
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Re: Pitch midi effect skipping values

Post by siliconarc » Thu May 26, 2022 12:00 pm

same here when it's racked/mapped to a macro. looks like a small bug, best to report to support.

ChaseBowman
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Joined: Fri Jan 16, 2015 7:28 pm

Re: Pitch midi effect skipping values

Post by ChaseBowman » Thu May 26, 2022 2:03 pm

Cheers, thanks for the reply...

Ive submitted a support request to Ableton for this...

yur2die4
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Re: Pitch midi effect skipping values

Post by yur2die4 » Thu May 26, 2022 4:33 pm

In a nutshell, it really shouldn’t do this. But there are situations where it is likely to occur.

If I’m not mistaken, the min and max are 127, which in itself is the full range for a basic continuous controller. It’s also the quantization used for macro knob fading controls etc when you go deeper into the rack.

If you were to use a simple midi controller, then yes, the macro should exhibit that behavior, which you’d remedy by limiting the range to + - 64 or so. But for controllers that offer relative and finer control, you’d expect that the macro SHOULD allow you to go into smaller increments. Also with mouse control. And it that’s not happening, it’s probably a bug.

Macros in racks in themselves have some quirks. If you have a macro assigned to a single parameter, the feedback will usually be that of the parameter you’re controlling. So, for a filter freq, you’d get Hz, for wet dry you’d get a percent, for delay time you’d get ms or rhythmic time intervals. But once you assign it to More than a single parameter, it pretty much is representing two things at once, and the feedback reading will now just be 0-127 or something. When it makes that switch, I don’t know how much the quantization is affected, but again, it should Only be affected by a midi controller that only uses the 128 steps, but allow for finer adjustment via mouse or other control.

This dynamic has been a thing for a while now… and I haven’t really tinkered with it in a few years, so things may have changed. I remember it being difficult in the past to find decent controllers that allowed for finer control.

chapelier fou
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Re: Pitch midi effect skipping values

Post by chapelier fou » Thu May 26, 2022 4:43 pm

Mapping in Live is so archaic.
In this case, I don’t see why we could not define an arbitrary stepping value for macros. We’ve got encoders with acceleration, right ?
MacBook Pro 13" Retina i7 2.8 GHz OS 10.13, L10.0.1, M4L.
MacStudio M1Max 32Go OS 12.3.1

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