Choosing not to learn certain controls

mo-seph · Post by **mo-seph** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 7:00 pm

I'm doing a lot of duo work with a keyboard player; he plays a midi keyboard attached to my laptop, and I hook him up with sounds etc. He's got a pedal to start and end loops, which generally works fine, except when he presses it when I am in the middle of learning some other controllers. In this case, live learns the pedal for a control, rather than seeing it as a message to work with. Since the pedal toggles record mode on or off, it becomes really confusing as the pedal actions are out of sync with live's state - live starts a loop when my keyboard player wants to stop and vice versa.

Anyone got any ideas for getting round this?

- I have to learn controls on the fly (as everything is improvised)
- I don't know when he's going to press the pedal
- He can't see the screen, so we need recording to Just Work

I have a bad feeling that live isn't really set up to deal with two independant users, and we might need to run a second copy. But that would be a lot of extra work.

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 8:10 pm

Use automap or mackie emulation mode, millions of references to what that means on this board. Then you never have to assign a knob.

mo-seph · Post by **mo-seph** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 11:03 am

Tone Deft wrote:Use automap or mackie emulation mode, millions of references to what that means on this board. Then you never have to assign a knob.

Won't really work for me, unless I've misunderstood what they do;I want to have knobs set up which affect specific parameters of many different sounds, and I don't think automap is flexible enough. It also has to be independant of what's on the screen (so I can play with stuff while I'm doing something else).

I'll have another dive into automap, though. There's definitely some things it can do for me if I can make the scripts work right.

mo-seph · Post by **mo-seph** » Sun Feb 25, 2007 11:27 am

OK, I've gone back to automap, and it doesn't really do what I need. Limitations are:

- can only control 1 channel's parameters at once; I'm getting round this by having a load of different automap templates for the same device, each of which only assign a few knobs, so I can lock each template to a different channel, but this only lets me do 6 channels

- can't map channel record button at all; this is the killer for me, as it's the most annoying learning task. When my keyboard player wants to record into a new channel, I have to delete the old mapping and then create a new one

- can only have global controls for the first 8 channels; since I record the master on the first channel, I'm down to 7, and that's not really enough

Any other ideas?

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Sun Feb 25, 2007 4:03 pm

To me it sounds like the ideal situation would be to have 2 MIDI interfaces

One only for his keyboard, with 'remote' control disabled,

And one for your controllers

You'd have to run him the special foot pedal control off your controller side

Since you're on a laptop and considering the current state of affairs with MIDI - USB, you've more than likely already got this setup, if you can plug his pedal into some other device than his keyboard.

?

mo-seph · Post by **mo-seph** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 2:40 pm

longjohns wrote:To me it sounds like the ideal situation would be to have 2 MIDI interfaces

One only for his keyboard, with 'remote' control disabled,

And one for your controllers

You'd have to run him the special foot pedal control off your controller side

Yup, that's what I'm doing.

Unfortunately, he still has the pedal. So if I'm learning some controllers and he hits the pedal, I learn that as a controller, and Live doesn't start recording

longjohns · Post by **longjohns** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 3:58 pm

Oh, I guess I was picturing it a bit differently, I see your problem now

Could you use Bome's to translate his midi message into a keystroke? and completely disable his MIDI interface in live?

This may or may not work, I don't know enough about Bome's

just throwing ideas out there.

mo-seph · Post by **mo-seph** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 12:51 pm

longjohns wrote:Could you use Bome's to translate his midi message into a keystroke? and completely disable his MIDI interface in live?

Don't know what Bome's are/is, but I like the keystroke idea! I'll have a play - thanks very much.

am is are · Post by **am is are** » Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:38 pm

if you two have separate midi input,
then isn't the simplest way to solve your problem for him to transmit on one specific midi channel and you can use the other 15 as necessary for your more complex/numerous mappings??

i don't know for 100% sure, but if you guys are transmitting on different MIDI channels, i don't see why LIVE would confuse any control info it receives

best