Ableton Forum

benjamingordon wrote:ah fair enough...

i just need to trigger some loops and see whether they are on or off with the pad leds...

that's what this is for, but it only works via the samples dropped onto the drumrack. it won't give you feedback for triggered clips in session view.

works fine. well done. thank you

regards
dorsch

just wanted to say thanks again! This particular application did not suit my specific needs, but it started me off on my own little PKontrol LED feedback project. Would not have had the insight without looking into your own rack here, so cheers.

I've got some scenes set up to control my send track parameters. The pads are used for both turning on certain devices, and for assigning knob/x-y pads to parmaters for said devices. The lights toggle on and off with the devices, but they also flash to give me feedback on their parameters.

For instance
- when I hit the delay pads, they flash to the rhythm of their currently set delay time.
When I turn on filters, LED flashing speed corresponds to cuttof frequency. So, if I turn on a filter that I've left closed from the last time I used it and I've forgotten to pull it back (something I always do with normal DJ'ing!..... "why are there only hi hats coming through?"), I can quickly tell because the pad is flashing slowly. So I just assign a knob to that pad and pull the filter down, and the pads blinking light speeds up as I turn the knob until its solid, at which point the filter is open.

I have feedback and control of other send params like reverb wetness, looper fowards/reverse, gate. You could do just about anything I'd imagine!

So can prepare my send channels for their next job without looking at the screen or too much fiddling.

It would be useful for ja great number of applications I guess. Setting it up is a bit messy, mind.

Thank you

ive tried this and it works but it doesnt stretch the loops as if they were clips in the session. it simply treats them as samples.

my issue is that i have a drum loop assigned to each pad and i need to see which are playing and which arent.

i use a wide range of tempos so always need the clips to be in time with whatever tempo.

if i load them in as samples then im restricted to the tempo of the sample as its loaded.

do you see what i mean?

well that's not really got anything to do with the padkontrol or this rack, that's a general limitation of the sampler in live.

I was going to recommend you try mapping all your drum loop samplers pitch control to the same control as the master tempo. You'd just need the medium CC for the samples pitch to match the same for the song tempo, and again for the maxium and minimum values - then as you control lives tempo the samplers pitch would increase accordingly
(providing you always control the tempo via that mapping, and not via scenes or some other automation) Unfortunately lives samplers don't have one value for continuous pitch control, only transpose which jumps up in semitones. Maybe you have another VST sampler that will enable you to do this?

otherwise, you'll have to use clips, and I'm not really sure how you would get midi feedback on their status, although I'm sure it can be done with MAX, or a remote script?

you could probably have a separate midi track with a bunch of racks with note length, arpegiator and external instrument devices that are set up to mimic what's going on with the clips based on what notes you've pressed - I kind of do a similar thing with some of my parameter feedback mapping, there is a dedicated midi channel just for feedback that works in parallel to the actual remote mapping. thing with this is if I go and use the mouse to change a parmeter, the padkontrol lights are then incorrect. this is not a problem for me since I'm not using the mouse in a live situation, but with clips it could be a problem as you couldn't use any follow actions or scene launching to control them, they would always have to be controlled via remote mapping to keep the feedback channel in sync with what clips are actually playing. So if you're happy with that scenario you could possibly do it with just racks.

I don't know if anyone else is having this problem with the arpegiators sending back to the PK, but if I have them set at a rate of 1/96 like they are in this example then I get a bit of a midi bottleneck if all 16 pads are having notes fired at them - sometimes everything freezes for a few seconds and I can't send messages out from the PK. If i put it at 100 ms I don't get ever get this. This is via midi yoke, btw.