Trying to record MIDI *with* delay (negative delay)

[willrees]

This is not one of the thousands of posts about latency. Live has great tools for that, and my setup is working fine. This issue is different.

I'm recording MIDI out of a Roland v-drum kit. The way Roland drum brains work is that if choose to listen to the sounds coming out of the brain itself (Local Control on), there is a slight, but consistent, delay in the MIDI that gets sent out. If you choose to turn Local Control off and listen to the sounds being generated by your computer instead, there is no delay in the MIDI that gets sent out.

I was thinking about what would happen if I recorded MIDI while listening to the sounds out of the brain (Local Control On). In this case, there is a set amount of delay in the MIDI being sent to Live. In Logic, I can use the track (or instrument, I forget) settings to apply a negative delay to the incoming MIDI notes such that the slight delay in the MIDI is compensated for. This is not quantization and doesn't have anything to do with plug-in latency. It's a track-specific negative delay applied to MIDI notes as they come in such that when you look at the notes in the resulting clip, they appear in the correct, non-delayed postion (i.e. they are all automatically shifted to the left by a consistent settable amount of time).

I've looked around and couldn't find anything about this. Does anyone know if Live has something like this feature?

[longjohns]

you can set track delays to negative values. not sure if that's exactly what you're after??

[willrees]

you can set track delays to negative values. not sure if that's exactly what you're after??

Do you mean the delay that can be applied per track on playback? That's similar, but not the same as moving the midi notes as you record them. The track delays would work until you needed to go in and edit something. All the midi notes would be off the actual beats. You could make it work by just ignoring the actual beat lines and such, but it would be nowhere near as elegant the midi notes just being recorded in the correct spot to begin with.

Also, cutting and pasting clips would be problematic as you would lose notes that fell outside of the clip's midi info, but sounded like they were inside the clip because of the track delay.

[longjohns]

try playing with the monitor settings in live. possibly using two tracks (one monitored, one not) and comparing the results