Ableton Forum

would anybody find "nudge" or "brake" controls, per-track, useful?

the basic idea is that you could assign each to a midi note and a certain length (something like 1/32 or 1/64) and use it to correct beats that were on tempo, but out of phase.

it could be velocity sensitive too: the harder you push the button, the harder the nudge or brake would be.

ryan,


I'm no DJ but I have a great need to be able to nudge or brake a clip after it has started playing. I think it's essential to 'live performance' to always be able to make corrections as you go along.

cheers
K

Yeah!

Me too that would be amazing! I feel like Live developers are tanking the product to be a complete solution, and they shouldnt forget the live side. Thats what made Live an amazing program. Use Live... live!!!

Hope we get that soon

Hugo

Good idea. It's very difficult to sync Live to another source, practically impossible really.

It's worth putting this one in the feature wishlist for sure.

i think putting a feature like that in each audio clip would not only help in the dj realm, but also add a new type of Effect for sequenced loops that don't need it for syncing so much. it would be a nice realtime parameter to tweak, keep em on their toes!

I would say it should be global as well. I tag-team using Live/Laptop/Midi controller with my DJ partner frequently and I beatmatch into his sets, but my inability to nudge something back into beat like a DJ can do using brake/nudge techniques is a real handicap for what we're trying to do. I can set things going and keep them in time for a minute or two. If it drifts, I have to resynch using the spacebar.

I know you can click on the tempo area and hit the +/- keys to kind of fake this, but this really needs to be a midi/keyboard assignable function that is always available at a moment's notice.

My vote's for the global implementation too. Right now, I use the mouse to do this by clicking in the tempo field, and then dragging up and down to match up beats with the other DJs. Doable, but not pretty.

yep. mentioned this a few times - glaring omission IMO

wow, thread from the past...

i think it should not be global, but per-track, because if it's global, if one track is out of sync in relation to another you can't correct it. (when i originally posted this idea, it was because my vocal clips were falling out of sync with my drum clips and i didn't want to have to retrigger the whole thing.)

another, more universal solution would be to make "nudge" and "brake" a "control-effect", that would affect the corresponding channel of whatever signal was being fed to it. that way if user wanted it global, they could put it on master -- if they wanted it per-track, they could put it there.

rs

Can you assign a midi slider to the tempo field and adjust the tempo as you would on decks? (Short, quick adjustments to get the track in time). I'm about to purchase a uc-33 and hope to be able to assign one of the sliders to taht function. Do-able?

patch:

the short answer is "not exactly". in the arrangement view you can set the maximum and minimum tempos, and if you assign tempo to a knob, it will divide that span up into 128 equal segments (that's a typical MIDI knob resolution) and everythime the knob "clicks", it will increment or decrement the tempo by the amount of that segment.

you'll probably be after more precise control than that, however, and to acheive the more precise control, you'll almost certainly have to run your midi data through something that can alter the way it outputs -- my current weapon of choice is the free and excellent Pure Data.

(i don't control tempo by MIDI at all, i actually use Pure Data to make two oxygen8s act as 2 independent decks that can control all functions of 8 tracks + 4 sends. nonetheless, adjusting it to control tempo in a precise way wouldn't be that hard.)

if you're familiar with a macro-micro knob configuration on precision engineering equipment, that might be a workaround to this problem: in a nutshell, knob "a" controls a wide tempo span while knob "b" does fine-tuning.

let me know if you want more detail...

$0.01,
rs

i think that abletons idea in not providing braking tools to this point is that they want you to correctly warp mark your clips before you put them into use. if you think about it, if youve done your job marking two clips and run them togther, theyll always stay in sync.

but i do would like to see that tool just as a time saver or a safety valve

this isn't an answer to the should the feature exist in Live question, but it's interesting: Hawtin's custom A&H mixer has a spring loaded push/pull encoder that mimics the action of manually cueing a record

Sinjin wrote:i think that abletons idea in not providing braking tools to this point is that they want you to correctly warp mark your clips before you put them into use. if you think about it, if youve done your job marking two clips and run them togther, theyll always stay in sync.

but i do would like to see that tool just as a time saver or a safety valve

it's not about staying in sync in live - it's about playing along with vinyl, which at the moment is a hassle

hi Sinjin,

the "safety valve" reason is right on, but there is more reason for this:

even if items are warped perfectly and i trigger them exactly at the right times (i use no quantization playing live), i may decide that i want to change the feel mid-stream, to make a piece "hang back" or "lean forward" a little bit, and i want to do it without having to re-trigger...

rs