Event Editor in Ableton? All I want to see is key signatures

[sunrise600]

Hi all,

This is one of my first posts on the ableton forums, so please don't tear me apart! I have been reading a music theory book, and it mentions that in most software packages these days (like Reason and Logic etc...) you can apparently see what's referred to as an 'Event Editor'. All I want to use this thing for is to show me all of my samples/midi clips and what keys they are in, so that I can get a global view of how my song is progressing and if there are any potential key clashes.


Is there ANY way in Ableton to view what key signature each midi track/sample are in? Please help, I swear I have been googling and checking the user manual, but to no avail.

Thanks in advance,

sun

[Warrior Bob]

No such thing exists in Live, as far as I know. For getting really low-level and dirty with MIDI events, I'd recommend using Reason or Logic, as they're a bit more oriented towards that kind of workflow.

[sunrise600]

Hey Bob,

Thanks for the reply. I figured out a pencil and paper can fix that since you pencil all the notes in, you should know what key they are in (DUH!) haha.

Just curious though, what IS Ableton's workflow in your opinion?

Regards,
sun

[Warrior Bob]

Live seems mainly geared towards a looping sort of workflow - it's kind of realtime, kind of not. It goes something like "Try things -> Make something cool -> Modify it -> try something more -> move on to another idea and repeat." The extensive and easy-to-setup MIDI features mean that it's really easy to do that "try things" step with hands-on control, which is very creative. It's actually the main reason I've settled on Live as my DAW of choice. It can be quite technical, but the focus seems to be erring on the side of "intuitive" even it makes certain technical things a bit harder.

For example, the easiest way I know of to enter MIDI data is to start recording on a clip, and play it in through a MIDI controller of some kind, then go in and fix the notes to have the properties I want (rigid quantization, for example). I find this easier than using the note editor because I find the editor somewhat awkward to use.

You almost HAVE to think of MIDI notes as discrete objects placed visually in time. You can't get a list - to edit all the "G" notes in a given octave, you can't do a clever "select" from an edit menu, you HAVE to select them with the mouse. It's intuitive, and less confusing, although sometimes I want to just get in and get dirty with the data.

Another example is MIDI mapping for controllers. For 90% of cases, it's really slick: enter MIDI mapping mode, choose the control to map to, and then mess with your MIDI controller on the control in question. But what if you have a device that's constantly outputting interesting data? Either you have to turn it off in the preferences menu (interrupts workflow, especially realtime), turn it off on the device itself (not always possible or easy), or forget about mapping anything else. If the MIDI mapping editor were a bit more full-featured, you could conceptually "mute" or "solo" a device for the purposes of mapping, which would solve this issue, but at the expense of simplicity. All of a sudden the editor has more features and before long it's scaring off creative people. I personally would like it, but I can see why they didn't do this.

I know that's kind of a long answer, but hopefully it answers your question!