Ableton Forum

Please mentally file this the general category of "interested in what others do".

I am in the process of working up some live perfomance pieces using VSTs in LIVE plus one or more hardware instruments which will be operated standalone, not MIDI'd up except for synchronizing tempo-controlled effects and/or patch changes.

The end result is that I will play various parts myself, trigger various parts in LIVE using pads or buttons on a controller, etc. I don't want to do Kid Beyond style record and loop stuff ... all of the sequenced parts will be prerecorded.

The "dilemna" of sorts revolves around trying to keep my rig as small, transportable and compact as possible. I can certainly use multiple controllers so that I can easily play various parts, but I'd rather use one or 2 and simply switch from track to track ... controlling each track/VST in succession.

Reviewing both LIVE's MIDI and Key control implementation, as well as the features of several controllers, I keep running into "gotchas".

The fact that most of the control options seem to be toggles creates an issue. So ... I can assign a pad or button to TOGGLE a Channel Mute, for instance,but there appears to be no way to specifically send a command to MUTE a track, and another different command to specifically UNMUTE.

Similarly, the Monitor In/Auto/Off is a toggled group ... there seems to be no facility to assign seperate commands to IN, AUTO and OFF.
If I am missing something obvious, I'd like nothing better than to be so informed and pointed to the right page in the manual. If not, I'd welcome any comments from others experienced with this kind of thing.
TIA

i have been running into issues like that my self.
i stumbled across bome's midi translator, it will translate midi data to key strokes, other midi data and a few other things.

i've been running the classic version and its been working,
(i was stoked to get my transport controls on my mpd24 remaped to key strokes so i could use them in live)

the midi translator pro version is pritty sweet.
it can do way more then the classic
you can create global and local variables and use them for creating expresion
to say make a pad work like a toggle button.
or make one button do a large number of things in 1 push.
and then something totaly different the next push.

um... yadda yadda lol here's the link

http://www.bome.com/midi/translator/

I'll look into that, thanks.

All other comments are still welcome!

Just to wrap this up ...

I believe I "overthought" the problem. It isn't necessary to find a way to get Live to handle the switching of tracks or VSTs to be played. It can be handled quite simply by assigning tracks to different MIDI channels and changing channels at the controller.

The Emu Xboard61 works quite well for this. It's possible to setup multiple patches, each of which can have up to 4 "zones", each on a different MIDI channel. The patches can be recalled with a single button press ... which is critical for this specific case. I checked out other controllers as well. While they offered similar capability, they required multiple button presses and knob twiddles to cahnge setups ... which would be ineffective for mid-song changes.