Using a MIDI controller to quickly turn MIDI tracks on and off

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TheLonelyStomachChillsUnlessItsDrunk
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Oct 26, 2018 8:33 pm

Using a MIDI controller to quickly turn MIDI tracks on and off

Post by TheLonelyStomachChillsUnlessItsDrunk » Sun Apr 28, 2019 5:10 am

Hi folks, I'm in the process of putting together a live show, and there's something that I'm really hoping is somehow possible. Here's what I want to do: I have a bunch of MIDI tracks (not VI's, just MIDI tracks, with the MIDI data being routed elsewhere), and they are all playing different looped MIDI sequences. These tracks are all disabled, and I want to be able press a certain key to enable each one. For example, C enables the first track, C# enables the second track, etc. Now I know of course that I can map the keys on a MIDI keyboard to the track activator button, but the problem there is that I'd have to press the key once to enable the track, and then press it again to disable the track, which won't work for me. I need it to work like this:

Keydown = enable
Keyup = disable

It would be complicated to explain why I need to do this, so I'll just say that it involves using MIDI-controlled effects to manipulate the audio from live instruments and vocals in various ways. I've been thinking about various way of doing this, and one idea I had was to keep all the MIDI tracks enabled and then drop MIDI effects on them that effectively nullify the MIDI data coming from the track somehow, or just transpose it to a range where it will have no effect. Then I would just need use a controller to enable and disable those MIDI effects. Of course I'd still run into the problem of Live ignoring "Keyup" data, but I've been thinking about building some MIDI controllers that function as buttons but are recognized as continuous controllers (like mod wheels). Then I could map them to some numerical value that will have the effect of enabling and disabling the MIDI effect module.

Anyway, so I know there are surely ways to do this, but the ideas that I've come up with would all be enormously time consuming, and I imagine that with the Max integration in Live 10, there are probably much simpler ways to do this.

To give you better idea of what I'm trying to do, here's a link to a video of me doing a performance that's along the lines of what I'm talking about. https://youtu.be/jh6MO_4HVko

If you jump to the last two sections in the video, at 4:02 and 4:42, you see me doing the kind of stuff I'm talking about, but on a smaller scale. The way I did it in this video is I just set up several different pass-through audio tracks that were all passing the same audio, but each one had a MIDI-controlled effect that was receiving a different MIDI sequence. Then I just gate and un-gate the audio from these different tracks as needed. The problem with doing it this way is that it's very expensive, in terms of memory and CPU, and I don't think I could scale it up to the numbers I'm thinking of.

I know this post was pretty long. Thanks to those of you who got through it all!

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