Import of custom Groove Quantises ...

jasefos · Post by **jasefos** » Sun Jan 11, 2004 6:52 am

Hopefully someone of influence at Ableton may encounter this post.

Much of todays modern dance music has a high dependence on using non-linear quantise grids particularly RnB styles and (good) Breaks.

Rather than just a implementing a standard (80's style) offset swing functions such as those appearing in Reason and many 80s drum machines it would be good to provide a function to import a groove in the form of a Standard MIDI file (or perhaps even a Cubase Part file).

I wish to use Live more as a compositional tool rather than just merely playing loops of stuff created in my DAW softare (Cubase SX2).

Whenever I'm making a new track I make up a custom groove template for it in Cubase SX2. I often source these grooves by recording MIDI from devices like my Korg Electribe EMX1 (which has groove templates that go well beyond 80's offset swing) or Steinberg's Groove Agent. Once a groove is in MIDI form in Cubase it is a simple matter to export the groove chunk out of Cubase SX2 as a standard MIDI file which I can import into Reason 2.5 using the "Get User Groove" function and then perform further sequencing within tracks inside of Reason.

Rather than expect Ableton to implement a full groove editor I'm merely proposing it be possible to add imported user grooves supplied to Live in the format of single-track MIDI files (which could come from anywhere) to wherever a Quantisation setting may be selected in Live.

It would be good if Imported User Grooves are local to the current Live Session File rather than be global to the entire system (which could get potentially messy).

Having the facility to add maybe up to 5 User Grooves to Live's menus per project would be sufficient for most Groove Quantise lover's purposes.

Motivation behind this request:
When Live is running syncronised with other sequencers in a performance environment with devices such as Korg Electribes, other computers running Reason, etc there is nothing more disconcerting than hearing flamming of when tracks/devices with mismatched grooves are played together in unison.

Dance music is ALL about timing ...
Grooves must always be tight !
It would be so cool if Ableton had this functionality.

(otherwise - love your work fellas!)

Gerhard · Post by **Gerhard** » Tue Jan 13, 2004 5:59 am

Hello,

thanks for your posting. For clarification: at what level would you like to apply groove:

- per Live Set (document)
- per track
- per clip

Best,

Gerhard / ableton

Jed · Post by **Jed** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 12:09 am

Wow! gerhard answered, and he doesn't know... hopefully he'll see it again..

This would be amazing.

My vote would be either per session or per clip - possibly existing alongside eachother, with one taking precedence. I sould love to see an environment native to Live for programming groove, not just importing midi sequences, as well.

I don't want to use my sequencer anymore! Its not very Logical - even after 7 years...

P King · Post by **P King** » Tue Feb 10, 2004 5:00 pm

hey guys...spoke with jase about this the other night...i gues being able to swing evry clip to a particular timing would be awesome...
p king...

Per Boysen · Post by **Per Boysen** » Tue Feb 10, 2004 6:35 pm

Gerhard wrote:Hello,
at what level would you like to apply groove:

- per Live Set (document)
- per track
- per clip

To me, as an improvising live looper, only "per Live Set" makes sense.

But I know a successful Swedish producer that use to perform with Live with pre recorded chunks of his material, adding live playing musicians and vocalists as well, and he would like to apply groove "per scene" and also "per clip". His trick is to load all the songs they are going to perform on a night in one Live Set session view. He has tracks for "bass", "kick", "pad", "lead" etc etc and then each song take up one or a bunch of horizontal session rows. Between songs are one empty session.

His system lets him cross fade songs by starting the hi hat from the next song while fading the first one etc etc.

So the bottom line, I guess, will be that all four groove applications, Live Set / clip / track / scene /, are needed. Then I suggest a global preference setting for the order in which they take command and overwrite each other.