Pickup in clip - how to handle musical pickups before a loop

[deerwolf]

I've posted something in the feature request area about how to deal with pickups (areas of a loop or phrase that precede the downbeat). I'm wondering how people usually deal with these, since the only solutions I can think of are a bit of a pain. You can see my feature request pasted below to understand better what I'm looking to do. Thanks!

Something I dreamt up to solve a common issue I have.

Some loops have a pickup before their first beat. If you want them to loop correctly, you would have to ignore the pickup since it would, for example, add an extra beat or [nth] note to your loop. This leads to the common problem when building a track where everything hits on the 1 - that massive everything-landing-on-the-one sound that can be common to Live when you jump to a new scene.

A simple solution to this would be to have a marker in the editor that would indicate where the pickup begins, and have it play that part in advance. As I imagine it, the user would click a button somewhere on the window to turn the pickup option on, and this would make a new anchor appear in the editor. The new anchor/marker would look the same as the begin/end ones but might be a different color. You could set this where you wanted the loop to pickup, and then if you launch the clip say a bar before you want it to drop, the next clip will play it's pickup before the one bar launch wait time is over. ! If the pickup time is greater than the wait time it could either just ignore the pickup or play a bit of it quantized to the nearest [nth] note.

This would be hugely helpful, since right now it is cumbersome to move the begin/end/loop markers to a new clip that just contains the pickup before the loop, or waiting until you record a performance and then doing in the timeline editor.

If you like this idea give it a big up!

[Tone Deft]

clip view -> enable Legato mode

[andrewbrewer]

i would love a way to actually set a pick-up. there are workarounds, but to be able to set it would be great.

[andrewbrewer]

usually what i do is mute the track and let the loop play ... just unmute right befor the pickup. seems a little kludgey but it works

[bagginz]

There are at least two ways that I do this, both apply to slightly different situations.

One is to record the clip with a pickup - say two bars; one bar with a half bar pickup and the second bar you wish to loop.

Then set the loop to only loop round the part that you wish to loop and trigger the clip one bar before you want it to loop. Result is you hear the pickup then the part loops indefinitely.

Another is to unlink envelopes and use the clip volume envelope to mute the first portion of the bar. Again loop just the portion which does not include the pickup.

There's another relevant trick which is to use shift + drag to drag the first warp marker to the left to enlongate the silence ebore the audio starts.

Cheers,
bagginz