Ableton Forum

Is there way to set up a MIDI gate just using Live's devices?

lives notelenghth?

Sorry, I was a bit unclear. I meant a side-chainable gate you drop on an instrument or audio track and trigger from another MIDI-track.

At the moment I use Sonalksis gate for this but it would be neat to do it with Live's devices. And its shortest release time is 50ms, it'd be nice with a snappier gate too.

In Live 7, you can have a sidechain on the Gate.

If you want to make the gate trigger everytime midi is received, I'm sure you could rig a simple synth as a sidegate audio source...

Great, thanks for the info.

or assign a midi note or a CC to the gain on a utility plug. key down, volume up, key up, volume down (or vice versa if you want). a CC might work better as I have a feeling a midi note will only toggle... if you need more cut just put two in a row and assign them both to the same midi thing. make sure to set the upper end of the range limit to something usbale or it'll cut by 35 db then add 35db.

dummy clips could also do this, or you could program it into your clips. if you need it realtime and playable i'd be using the utility setup i first mentioned though.

Ah, interesting. As you said, MIDI notes toggles on/off when preferably it should "sustain" while being pressed. And sure enough, two utilities after each over gives such a steep range you can actually gate with a pot. A bit of zipper noise though and not exactly how I'd like to do it, but it opens up more options. Thanks!

m-m wrote:Ah, interesting. As you said, MIDI notes toggles on/off when preferably it should "sustain" while being pressed. And sure enough, two utilities after each over gives such a steep range you can actually gate with a pot. A bit of zipper noise though and not exactly how I'd like to do it, but it opens up more options. Thanks!

you might be able to reduce the zippering by reducing the cut amount on the second utility. this should reduce the steepness slightly. it just occurred to me that this is the same as using a track mute switch in the mixer, so maybe try assigning something to that as well and see what happens.

dunno what controller you're using but if you have any spare midi buttons and know how to configure them try setting one to act as an instant switch ie. when you press it outputs 127, when up outputs 0 and switch the range assignments in live.

Good idea. I have a Novation Zero SL so it was no problem assigning a button to Track Volume and that way "gate" only when pressed (or vice versa). Now if I only I could figure out how to get some attack or release on the "gate" too. Probably not possible but this is good exerecise for me using Live a bit more modular. So thanks again.

Hey, I know you said that you wanted to use ableton effects, but this is free and does exactly what you're describing.
http://www.kvraudio.com/get/664.html

Thanks, until Live 7 that will do fine.