Ableton Forum

Ok, after long time and lots of experimentation I decided to review some of my workaround in case there is someone with the same issues and want to work this out. (it is long replay)

I discovered that session view is no good for this.
Now I do everything in arrangement view with great help of Clyphx. It allows me that I can move Loop around the arrangement with few simple commands and it is rock solid. Every time I decide to go to next part I just turn loop of.
It is all in Locators: Time signatures, Loop points, Global Quantization, End may more...

Now my bandmate decided to go for Live to and I was really happy because this was great to synchronize the the parts of songs with everything that is going on. In this way now we can be sure that when we switch to next part, his arrangement will send program changes to his external synths and all goodies that comes with any kind of automations.
And the most important part, we are finally in sync using FTP cable.

Now what I planned to do was quite obvious... Copying my arrangements to his computer and control it from my computer, so everything stays tide.

Well, guess what. You can't do that. The problem is in MIDI clock!
So what does MIDI clock have to do with arrangement????
Well it tells you where a playhead have to be and it slaves your Live to other Live.
The problem appears if we engage a loop at specific point and we stay at that loop for let say 8 bars, the playhead of slaved Live will jump 8 bars forward in arrangement when a loop is disengaged!!! It seems like slaved Live is counting bars and when you turn loop of, it jumps to that position.

So we decided to try a different approach.

We decided that slaved Live should be in session view and master Live in arrangement view.
Because session is not dependent of playhead position.

We made a track in master Live for triggering scenes in slave Live with simple notes.
I made a template of this track so I could quickly set this to other projects that we are working on.
I just needed to set specific notes (that were MIDI mapped to slaves scenes) one bar (it depends on slave Live's global quantization) before the new part or new time signatures.
This template is a track with clips in it. Every clip has it's own note. The first part of the song is G8. Next is G7, next is G6 end so on. If we need any new triggers for some specific trick we don't need to rearrange everything. For that we have a 6 notes for extra triggering between two parts in the song.

Now everything is working great! And I'm really exited and looking forward to see what directions of workflow and concepts this approach will lead us and expend our sonic possibilities.

I very appreciate your help guys!

Thanx again!

Vitja

You should tell ableton for your midi clock issue. It sucks.
Anyway, happy to read someone who's happy !

Well, real clock issues are with no significance here.
Yes, I can say, that it is drifting around 0.05 BPM constantly, but in our setup, this is no issue.
I read about problems about slaving Live to external clock, but so far, it is OK.

I would like to see more control over external clock parameters. It would be useful, to have options like turning off the
song position, but keep the start message.

I tried this with song and pattern modes, but it seems that it does't matter... it always stays the same.

I have bigger problems with MIDI latency. I just cant play hardware synth in unison with plugins in Live. This is something I find really disappointing. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I tried everything that came to my mind.

What I really like about Live are it's extensions. M4L and Clyphx are really creative. I love the way I can brainstorm in various ways of doing something. But I find myself spending precious time on something that has to do with basic ideas.
It seems Live 9 does't offer any improvements on this side. OK, there are some, that I can find them handy, but we are talking basic here.

As long as Stray (Clyphx developer) is doing his magic, I do not need to worry about my creativity!

Hey guys! I think it all comes to this

Ok so I have a similar problem to this but according to the tests I've been making there are still 2 issues I'm struggling to get around.

So to clear:

- My setup is all in midi expect for voice and guitar;
- I also work with odd signature;
- My quantization is 1 Bar too;
- Use cliphx to change time signatures and make ramps between different songs so that it all starts at the proper right bar without things getting messed up when launching sequences or between transitions;
- Also I use maschine inside Ableton.

About Maschine:

- Sync is OFF
- Using the midi note program change method
- I have an instance of Maschine for each song so that I don't have to open any song during live. So to save cpu only the song that is playing has it's proper Maschine instance active (through chain selector method which I use a lot)
This setup took me 2 years to built and program so that CPU was optimised.
(Btw It's running on a Macbook pro i7 16gb ssd at 256 buffer with cpu average about 50%) which for the this kind of setup is very good.
Here's a screensshot:




OK now the problem:

I've tested with 20 instances of Maschine while switching fast between scenes (which for cpu is a very demanding thing if the setup isn't properly configured) and it works like a charm... well if "8" isn't on the way.

Ok so to clear from my experience there is a difference for example if you're working let' say in 7/4 or in 7/8. You may think this is somehow stupid because one is the double of the other... but it all comes down to the music and in this case 7/8 is the way to go.

...But sometimes ableton freaks out...

Is anyone of you working with maschine also ever encoutered this problem?

Thank you

Andy