Ableton Forum

3dot... wrote:

Sage wrote:

3dot... wrote:when putting the tempo at 6/8.. and beyond...
...live enters 'Jazz mode'...
in this mode...
live allows to record only 1 audio track...
no metronome...
and Midi is not synced to the clock...
also black and white keys get the same color...
and the built in instruments are loosly tuned...
enjoy..

Does the room go dark and fill with smoke and a bottle of bourbon appear from nowhere? Also does my distance from the monitor affect the volume of the track?

If not, then Live 8 was a waste of $189.

smoke ...yes...
the bourbon pack costs extra...
Heroin live-pack is included...

I've heard the bourbon pack is included in the suite. Isn't that true? I was THIS close to upgrading to suite...

new merch idea? ableton bourbon? a collab with maker's mark or woodford reserve?

Another bonus feature is that instead of quantizer for when you play out of time, an Ableton employ comes to throw a chair at your head and calls you a weeping-willow-s**tsack.

But anyway, is Ableton so convinced that no musically educated person would dare to work on music on a computer that they did not even think to include correct note markings based on the key you work in over the 9 releases of their software?

I often write in C minor and having that idiotic D# after D made me commit too many dumb mistakes while editing.

And yes, I'm replying on a five year old dead thread, deal with it. Didn't feel like starting a new one and since Ableton still doesn't seem to care I figured it's worth mentioning. For god's sakes, there's like an inch of free room on the layout in the top left between the time settings and the play settings, why couldn't they just throw in a key signature thing for each song there? Would it really take a team of expert coders working across the clock for a year to set that up?

I know my way around musical keys and scales pretty well, and I have to say it's never confused me. In fact, I never look at the note it says, but rather at the piano keys instead of any displayed notes.

I'm not sure if you're a keys player or guitar or some other instrument where the piano keys are foreign to you, but I can say that Live's MIDI capabilities don't bother me as someone who knows something about music.

Russound wrote:
I often write in C minor and having that idiotic D# after D made me commit too many dumb mistakes while editing.

I'd understand this better if you were scoring. It's very easy for me to convert sharps to flats in my head as they are after all the same note in a tempered scale (despite conventions of naming).

That said, saving the main scale would be nice. I typically move between scales so section scales would be better. I'd like a score editor myself.

Stromkraft wrote:they are after all the same note in a tempered scale (despite conventions of naming).

You mean the same *pitch*. Not the same note. They are different things. An Eb4 and D#4 are the same pitch (frequency) in 12-tet, but they aren't the same note as they imply different functions either within a key or as chromatic alterations from outside of a given key. Just FYI.

Live doesn't even have the ability to designate a key, which would be the first step towards having mixed accidentals in the piano roll.

Logic can designate keys but notes still show in sharps when you hover over them in the piano roll. Which is weird considering Logic has a pretty robust score editor.

I'm guessing it may have something to do with decisions made with the original MIDI spec to avoid the complications of determining differences between enharmonic pitches.

The problem is that one could conceivably have a situation where both an F# and a Gb were in the same piece of music if there were some advanced harmonic progressions going on. How does the program know which one is which? The app would have to be able analyze harmony and make a decision based on the other notes present and where they are coming from and where they are going in order to determine which enharmonic spelling to choose.

So it might not be quite as simple as it sounds to implement.

Probably best to just think of Live as an instrument. Like most (all?) equal tempered instruments it makes no distinction between F# and Gb or whatever because that has everything to do with the way we think about music and nothing to do with the actual mechanics of producing a pitched sound.

But I would like a bit more contrast between the white and black note lanes in the piano roll editor.

crumhorn wrote:Probably best to just think of Live as an instrument. Like most (all?) equal tempered instruments it makes no distinction between F# and Gb or whatever because that has everything to do with the way we think about music and nothing to do with the actual mechanics of producing a pitched sound.

Well very few musical instruments make a distinction between the two because very few instruments have labels like "F#" and "Gb" on them at all, unlike the GUI of a piano roll editor in a DAW like Live.

For me anyway it's a non issue because I end up always writing in some fucked up scale or regular scale with accidentals etc. If it correctly noted the scale it would also have to let me note the accidentals.

I have similar problems with Push's scales functions. Recently I've been on a sort of mixed scale binge, none of which are available in Push's selections.

The sad part is unlike stringtapper, I'm not that fluent in music theory still, it's like I jumped off into the deep end right away.

An example, not surprisingly called an altered scale:
C, D?, D?, E, F?, A?, B?, C

Machinesworking wrote:For me anyway it's a non issue because I end up always writing in some fucked up scale or regular scale with accidentals etc. If it correctly noted the scale it would also have to let me note the accidentals.

I have similar problems with Push's scales functions. Recently I've been on a sort of mixed scale binge, none of which are available in Push's selections.

The sad part is unlike stringtapper, I'm not that fluent in music theory still, it's like I jumped off into the deep end right away.

An example, not surprisingly called an altered scale:
C, D?, D?, E, F?, A?, B?, C

The thing I find fascinating about this type of scale is that the "correct" spelling very much depends on the context.

e.g. the "normal" use of an altered scale would be to create melodic tension over the dominant 7th chord. So the C altered scale would be used over a C7 chord in the key F - (so the Bb would come from the key signature). In this context the spelling that you gave makes sense as Root, flat 9, sharp 9, 3rd, sharp 11, flat 13 and minor 7th, i.e. the root 3rd and 7th are retained as being the essential notes of the dominant 7th chord, but every other note is Altered and the fifth is omitted all together,

But if you give it the alternative name of Super Locrian and say something like "My piece is in the C Super Locrian mode" then you can treat it like an altered form of C minor and spell it C Db Eb Fb Gb Ab Bb C (with the Bb, Eb and Ab coming from the key signature). i.e. root, minor 2nd, minor 3rd, dim 4th, dim 5th, minor 6th and minor 7th. Then again you could use the same scale name and spelling but treat it as the 7th mode of Db Melodic Minor, with 6 flats and one double flat in the key signature (but only if you are a masochist).

Why did I write all that? mainly because I find it all fascinating and by writing it down helps me to consolidate my limited understanding of these things. And because I've recently spent a lot of time thinking about these things while developing my "fretlearner" web page (see sig) which is currently receiving a major "drains up" overhaul. (Being retired I can afford to spend whole days on hobbies, just can't afford to buy anything)

stringtapper wrote:

crumhorn wrote:Probably best to just think of Live as an instrument. Like most (all?) equal tempered instruments it makes no distinction between F# and Gb or whatever because that has everything to do with the way we think about music and nothing to do with the actual mechanics of producing a pitched sound.

Well very few musical instruments make a distinction between the two because very few instruments have labels like "F#" and "Gb" on them at all, unlike the GUI of a piano roll editor in a DAW like Live.

you are quite right of course, and it would be quite easy for Live to give the right names to diatonic notes for a given key signature. But as soon as you go beyond that and introduce any kind of chromaticism then it can quickly get very complicated. Too complicated for Ableton to want to take it on I should think.

For example if I use a C#7 chord as a substitute dominant in the key of C (not uncommon) then is that an F or an E# in there? How far should Ableton go in the name of correct musical spelling?

Personally I think they got it right by ducking the whole issue.

Machinesworking wrote:For me anyway it's a non issue because I end up always writing in some fucked up scale or regular scale with accidentals etc. If it correctly noted the scale it would also have to let me note the accidentals.

Exactly the same here.

I have similar problems with Push's scales functions. Recently I've been on a sort of mixed scale binge, none of which are available in Push's selections.

I don't use Push's in-scale mode, which is fine - but now there's a lot less octaves to work with. I need to look into the simple text-file editing to make my own scales, but even they will end up with their own "accidentals". strongly thinking of getting a good-quality no-frills keyboard to supplement this setup.

crumhorn wrote:For example if I use a C#7 chord as a substitute dominant in the key of C (not uncommon) then is that an F or an E# in there? How far should Ableton go in the name of correct musical spelling?

Yeah but C#7 wouldn't be the correct spelling for that tritone sub in the first place. It's pretty much always thought of as a dominant built on b2 instead of on #1 because the root movement is almost invariably b2->1. That's kind of the whole point of the tritone sub: that downward chromatic bass motion, and spelling the chord from b2 makes that motion clear. Flats generally go down, sharps generally go up.

crumhorn wrote:Personally I think they got it right by ducking the whole issue.

Well i doubt they actually did duck it and suspect that it was already ducked back when the MIDI spec was created. Even Max's number boxes when set to MIDI note names only display sharps. It was most likely an early decision based on the amount of programming it would take to determine the differences between enharmonic spellings based on context.

stringtapper wrote:

crumhorn wrote:For example if I use a C#7 chord as a substitute dominant in the key of C (not uncommon) then is that an F or an E# in there? How far should Ableton go in the name of correct musical spelling?

Yeah but C#7 wouldn't be the correct spelling for that tritone sub in the first place. It's pretty much always thought of as a dominant built on b2 instead of on #1 because the root movement is almost invariably b2->1. That's kind of the whole point of the tritone sub: that downward chromatic bass motion, and spelling the chord from b2 makes that motion clear. Flats generally go down, sharps generally go up.

so my question becomes "is that a B or a Cb in there?"

Is it really a Db7 or is it a Db augmented 6th?

crumhorn wrote:

stringtapper wrote:

crumhorn wrote:For example if I use a C#7 chord as a substitute dominant in the key of C (not uncommon) then is that an F or an E# in there? How far should Ableton go in the name of correct musical spelling?

Yeah but C#7 wouldn't be the correct spelling for that tritone sub in the first place. It's pretty much always thought of as a dominant built on b2 instead of on #1 because the root movement is almost invariably b2->1. That's kind of the whole point of the tritone sub: that downward chromatic bass motion, and spelling the chord from b2 makes that motion clear. Flats generally go down, sharps generally go up.

so my question becomes "is that a B or a Cb in there?"

Is it really a Db7 or is it a Db augmented 6th?

It's Db7: Db-F-Ab-Cb

Since this kind of usage (in modern times at least) is usually in a jazz context the tritone sub will probably resolve down to either a major or minor seventh tonic. In your example of C major the seventh of the Db7 chord (Cb) would simply be a common tone with the CMaj7 chord's own seventh and become a B at that point.

And yes, that would probably be a nightmare to get a computer to understand that kind of context to make such a change.