Please make MIDI looping work like Audio looping does.
Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 11:02 pm
PREMISE
There are a bunch of us who have gone from looping Audio clips live to looping MIDI clips live, because it opens up a whole world of sonic possibilities. You can tweak your soft synth's front panel after you loop, as well as still being able to manipulate all the audio effects you'd use if you were looping audio.
PROBLEM
There is one problem that we have all come up against in our migration from looping Audio clips to looping MIDI clips and that is - when looping MIDI, not all of the MIDI notes you record into a clip will play back, depending on the "feel" that you play with.
PROBLEM IN DEPTH
From a musical standpoint, sometimes you're going to play a hair before the beat, sometimes right on the beat, and sometimes a hair after the beat, depending on the feel of the backing tracks you're playing with. Now if you're looping audio, you can play behind the beat, on the beat, and ahead of the beat with no problem - all your audio will loop & play back properly. This is what we've all been doing up until this point.
Now that we're looping MIDI, though, you can play behind the beat & on the beat, but if you play ahead of the beat every bit of your MIDI loop will play *except* the MIDI notes whose heads land before 1.1.0.
In this example the Bb and D of the Gm chord will not play back every time we loop to the start of the clip! Of course this is not the case if we loop audio. With audio we would hear the whole chord, granted it would be minus the tiny bits we played before 1.1.0, but those bits are inconsequential. (If they were played so early as to be a "pick up", they would've been played again at the end of the audio loop, where they would be heard.)
Of course we could record quantize the MIDI to solve this, but we've tried this and it absolutely kills the feel of the rest of the clip that you're recording, and we would all like the option of being able to record MIDI with record quantization off. This is the big issue.
PROPOSED SOLUTION
If an option for "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" could be added, that would truncate the heads of the early notes so that they would start at 1.1.0 and now be played back, that would be great!!! That would make live MIDI looping soooooooo much more viable for all us MIDI loopers.
We're thinking truncate vs. quantize those notes that land a hair before 1.1.0, since we don't necessesarily want to change the release time positions, and if we really want to quantize, we can still use the record quantize feature.
The same performance from above with "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" enabled would look like this:
EXTRA CREDIT!
There is a thread on the forum discussing this,
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0
and another user (thanks glitchrock-buddha!) has suggested that the early bits of notes could be tacked onto the end of the loop, so that you actually do get your exact performance. This would be icing on the cake. If you could swing this, great, but even the truncation solution would put us MIDI loopers leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now.
Thanks for taking the time to read this through, and please, please, please consider implementing this soon!
Sincerely,
The Ableton LIVE MIDI Looping Squad
There are a bunch of us who have gone from looping Audio clips live to looping MIDI clips live, because it opens up a whole world of sonic possibilities. You can tweak your soft synth's front panel after you loop, as well as still being able to manipulate all the audio effects you'd use if you were looping audio.
PROBLEM
There is one problem that we have all come up against in our migration from looping Audio clips to looping MIDI clips and that is - when looping MIDI, not all of the MIDI notes you record into a clip will play back, depending on the "feel" that you play with.
PROBLEM IN DEPTH
From a musical standpoint, sometimes you're going to play a hair before the beat, sometimes right on the beat, and sometimes a hair after the beat, depending on the feel of the backing tracks you're playing with. Now if you're looping audio, you can play behind the beat, on the beat, and ahead of the beat with no problem - all your audio will loop & play back properly. This is what we've all been doing up until this point.
Now that we're looping MIDI, though, you can play behind the beat & on the beat, but if you play ahead of the beat every bit of your MIDI loop will play *except* the MIDI notes whose heads land before 1.1.0.
In this example the Bb and D of the Gm chord will not play back every time we loop to the start of the clip! Of course this is not the case if we loop audio. With audio we would hear the whole chord, granted it would be minus the tiny bits we played before 1.1.0, but those bits are inconsequential. (If they were played so early as to be a "pick up", they would've been played again at the end of the audio loop, where they would be heard.)
Of course we could record quantize the MIDI to solve this, but we've tried this and it absolutely kills the feel of the rest of the clip that you're recording, and we would all like the option of being able to record MIDI with record quantization off. This is the big issue.
PROPOSED SOLUTION
If an option for "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" could be added, that would truncate the heads of the early notes so that they would start at 1.1.0 and now be played back, that would be great!!! That would make live MIDI looping soooooooo much more viable for all us MIDI loopers.
We're thinking truncate vs. quantize those notes that land a hair before 1.1.0, since we don't necessesarily want to change the release time positions, and if we really want to quantize, we can still use the record quantize feature.
The same performance from above with "Play early MIDI notes from 1.1.0" enabled would look like this:
EXTRA CREDIT!
There is a thread on the forum discussing this,
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... sc&start=0
and another user (thanks glitchrock-buddha!) has suggested that the early bits of notes could be tacked onto the end of the loop, so that you actually do get your exact performance. This would be icing on the cake. If you could swing this, great, but even the truncation solution would put us MIDI loopers leaps and bounds ahead of where we are now.
Thanks for taking the time to read this through, and please, please, please consider implementing this soon!
Sincerely,
The Ableton LIVE MIDI Looping Squad