Play Pitch Transpositions to Multiple Tracks in Realtime

[Tranceophile]

Hi folks,

I'm in a bit of a pickle. In 2015, I created a pair (a "sender" and a "receiver") of Max for Live MIDI devices which greatly increases the usefulness of Live for improvisation and composition, and I was so happy with it that I published it on maxforlive.com (http://www.maxforlive.com/library/devic ... rrt-sender, http://www.maxforlive.com/library/devic ... t-receiver) and described it on a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G796oTK8Xog). From the start, I had hoped that Ableton would learn about the capability and perhaps choose to integrate it more seamlessly into a future release of Live, so I gave it minimal copyright protection (Creative Commons "By" attribution); I also strove to lay out and comment the M4L devices to maximize readability/analyzability. Well, quite a few end users learned about this pair of M4L devices and used them, and I received my share of thanks and congratulations. However, I am now starting to get requests (in the form of comments on the YouTube video) to improve the capability, and I suspect that these improvements would require a more integrated solution than is possible for an application programmer using M4L to deliver. And so here I am today, asking the very competent developers at Ableton to consider adding this capability to Live- either along the lines of what I created, or something that invests Live with equivalent functionality and convenience.

A description of the capability can be found at the links above, but it boils down to this: allow the performer to play and record MIDI pitch transpositions from one track (the "sender"), with these transpositions being listened to by other tracks ("the receivers") so that these latter tracks' MIDI clips are transposed according to the offsets transmitted by the sender. Used in conjunction with a split keyboard or multiple MIDI controllers, this enables the performer to essentially play key changes in the accompaniment tracks (bass, pad, etc.) with one hand -one finger, actually- while improvising with the right hand on the lead (guitar, synth, etc.) track. In this manner, the performer is free to change the key at his or her whim, rather than having to stay within one key or a predefined key sequence throughout the piece. Another application of the capability is in composition: rather than laboriously copying and transposing clips to effect key changes, those key changes can be recorded on a separate track.

The capability works very well, but users have recently informed me that the pitch transpositions can be momentarily delayed if they do something like scroll down through the clips. Perhaps I am wrong, but I speculate that this may be because M4L sits on top of the Live system as an application layer, and that scrolling through the clips may involve housekeeping (pushing state onto stacks and that sort of thing) that requires Live to temporarily freeze access to certain processing (such as servicing event queues) in order to ensure the integrity of software state. If that is the case, then I am powerless to deal with these momentary interruptions, except to advise my users not to scroll through their clips while the sender is transmitting pitch transpositions.

Ableton, you have produced an outstanding piece of software that is enormously useful for creating music, especially live music. Could you please check out the capability I have created and consider incorporating it, or something equivalent, into a future release of Live?