Ableton Forum

I have been fighting with this device for months now and I thought I had cracked it, but on the last lot of testing today I realised a super fundamental issue.

I am using Looper with an external Midi Controller/Custom Control Script. I have one Midi button to Record, Play and Stop the Looper before it scrolls around these selections again. Just to clarify these Midi commands are not sent to the transport button (it is not map-able) but in-fact are sent to the device buttons.

I have attached a video in the google drive link so you can hear a little bit what is going on.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PahGk9 ... drive_link

If you watch the video keep your eye on the Looper, you can hear what is going on.

I have set a reaction which triggers the Looper to record when empty, to play after recording and to stop after playing.

In Css that means I have a reaction set with conditions change Device Parameter 2 from 0>1 on the first push from 1>2 on the second push and 2>0 on the third push.

I have set quantisation on the Looper to 1/4 bar or 1 beat. In one way this works fantastically at snapping the loop in time with the song, but the problem I have is that the button press is not quantised.

This means the Loop is always slightly longer or shorter than the note in Ableton, and as you can hear in the video it leads to variations in tonality with the playback of the loop. Quirky for sure, but really not what I’m looking for.

Is there some workaround here? Some way in which I can quanitze the button press by 1 beat?

That’s a strange issue for sure. The easiest thing I can think of is to activate Remote for your MIDI controller, make sure the controller is set to Note or Momentary so that it sends a NoteOff or 0 message when you let go of the button, then map it to the Looper’s Pedal control using Cmd+M.

This doesn’t let you keep your exact same setup — first tap records, second tap enters playback or overdubbing, double tap stops, tap and hold is either Undo or Clear depending on whether the loop is playing. But if you can get behind the workflow, the quantization should work the way you want it to.

If that’s not going to work for you, try setting a longer quantization time and see if you can get more predictable results. In the video it looked like you were recording a lot of three- and five-beat loops, which is easy to do with such a short quantization. Personally, I quantize to a full bar unless I specifically want polymeter loops.

Hope this helps!