Groove Function Half Useless
Posted: Sat Mar 13, 2010 7:17 pm
Something that always bothered me but never cared to talk about :
I can't believe Ableton didn't try to see things a little more from the user's point of view when they implemented the groove function in Live 8 :
Groove only affects notes of a clip and not the controller values attached to it.
This is so frustrating...
For example i have a percussion track with XILS3 (could be any vsti), and i have for every note a different controller value (for example CC#15) to control the attack of the VCA's envelope. I didn't assign the midi clip to any groove yet, but i like the result. Now, to spice things up a little, i add a groove (slightly, timing = 20%) and, most important, i add a little bit of randomness to the timing (10%) to "humanize" things. One would have the right to expect the clip to play exactly as it was before, just with a different rhythmic feel, but with the same sound, that is with my CC#15 controlling the attack as before, right ?
Well... no ! The controller stays stupidly at its quantized position, not following the groove at all, modulating the VCA's attack whereas the note it was supposed to modulate already played !
The result is just unusable...
Musically speaking, the controllers are part of the clip as much as parameters like velocity or pitch, especially in our vsti world. Why the hell doesn't it follow the groove as the rest ? Is there something i am missing ? If no, this groove thing was a bit sloppily thought out, imo.
Too bad, the groove function is one of the few reasons i upgraded to version 8.
And since so far 8 works less than ok, i might as well go back to 7 for new projects. And too bad for all the sets started with 8 and not exportable to 7, even track by track from the browser.
I really hope this groove incompleteness will be rearranged in future updates.
Off to the wishlist forum...
I can't believe Ableton didn't try to see things a little more from the user's point of view when they implemented the groove function in Live 8 :
Groove only affects notes of a clip and not the controller values attached to it.
This is so frustrating...
For example i have a percussion track with XILS3 (could be any vsti), and i have for every note a different controller value (for example CC#15) to control the attack of the VCA's envelope. I didn't assign the midi clip to any groove yet, but i like the result. Now, to spice things up a little, i add a groove (slightly, timing = 20%) and, most important, i add a little bit of randomness to the timing (10%) to "humanize" things. One would have the right to expect the clip to play exactly as it was before, just with a different rhythmic feel, but with the same sound, that is with my CC#15 controlling the attack as before, right ?
Well... no ! The controller stays stupidly at its quantized position, not following the groove at all, modulating the VCA's attack whereas the note it was supposed to modulate already played !
The result is just unusable...
Musically speaking, the controllers are part of the clip as much as parameters like velocity or pitch, especially in our vsti world. Why the hell doesn't it follow the groove as the rest ? Is there something i am missing ? If no, this groove thing was a bit sloppily thought out, imo.
Too bad, the groove function is one of the few reasons i upgraded to version 8.
And since so far 8 works less than ok, i might as well go back to 7 for new projects. And too bad for all the sets started with 8 and not exportable to 7, even track by track from the browser.
I really hope this groove incompleteness will be rearranged in future updates.
Off to the wishlist forum...
