is it ableton live or I am going insane

[thawkins]

I have two things going around in my projects recently:

1. The "Track 2" mystery. 2 identical MIDI tracks, with Arpeggiator, NoteModulator M4L device, then a MIDI rack with 6 Chord devices so I can run an arp and add some harmonic notes by fading up the rack knobs.
   The first track works as I expect it to: notes go in and go out to the hardware. There are no duplicate notes due to NoteModulator or any of the Chord instances.
   The 2nd track is outputting 6x noteon-noteoff for as it should (I assume one copy for each chord instance chain). In fact I notice that I have set up the MIDI rack in a stupid way so it actually does multiply the notes, but in this case why does this problem not happen with the first track?
2. The "NoteModulator" mystery. In the same scenario, the note modulator M4L device is messing with the NoteOff events, but only on one track. I have both tracks on an arpeggiator with 80% gate, and checking the MIDI monitor logs I can clearly see how the 1st track is working correctly - NoteOff is sent comfortably before the next NoteOn, but on the 2nd track, the NoteOff is sent just before the next NoteOn, which causes a small click in the sound (I assume because the envelope generator in the hardware is reacting to a new NoteOn before the sound has had time to fade out correctly).

I might be going insane anyway.

Edited November 2, 2020 by thawkins

[thawkins]

What's really really annoying with the NodeModulator thing is that it used to be an amazing trick for making a single note arpeggio something interesting by modulating the velocities (especially setting the loop length to 7 or another weird number) and now if I just enable the device without any knob twiddling at all, it just creates the effect of gently fading out my awesome bass arp because it's affecting the NoteOff messages somehow.

I realise it's not a part of the official M4L device set that you get bundled with the software, but still.

[Nil]

Have you tried contacting the person who built the m4l device ?

[sheatheman]

If you want random velocity, there are many other ways to achieve that.

[auxien]

2 hours ago, Nil said:

Have you tried contacting the person who built the m4l device ?

this yeah. 3rd party m4l device that acts funny when you have multiple copies of it running in the same set seems pretty likely the issue.

are both tracks feeding to the same MIDI source/channel?

[Nil]

15 minutes ago, sheatheman said:

If you want random velocity, there are many other ways to achieve that.

Indeed, built-in Velocity device is perfectly fine for that.

Edited November 1, 2020 by Nil

[user]

My bet is also on the note modulator device causing problems as it's over 7 years old and afaik cycling 74 likes to break/change  functionality with each Max update. 

A vague stab in the dark; maybe the reason things work correctly with the first NM device is the way the device addresses the Live API. You could try opening the device and check the way the API is addressed/accessed in NM and the current recommended way of doing things, which can be found in the max/msp / max for live documentation.

If you always have the device chains on the same tracks (ie always on tracks 1 and 2 and this never changes) you could look for the bits in the device that use "ThisTrack" or something similar and change it so it refers to the corresponding specific track IDs.    

 

Edited November 1, 2020 by user

[thawkins]

Yeah I guess you are correct that it is the M4L device that is causing the problem.

It's not easily replacable by the Velocity builtin, because it is in fact more like a step sequencer. It's one of Robert Henke's free M4L things that are basically the only non-builtin things I use in Live https://www.roberthenke.com/technology/m4l.html

AFAIK he is also one of the developers for Live itself, so I guess I expected those things to be more robust.

I guess I could look into what is happening behind the scenes, but it feels like a huge rabbit hole to descend into.

Thanks for all the advice and tips though!

[auxien]

26 minutes ago, thawkins said:

It's one of Robert Henke's free M4L things that are basically the only non-builtin things I use in Live https://www.roberthenke.com/technology/m4l.html

AFAIK he is also one of the developers for Live itself, so I guess I expected those things to be more robust.

he was one of the original developers/creators of Live, but i think (could be wrong) he's no longer actively developing as a part of Ableton. maybe as a consultant or something? 

anyway i tried one of his granulators (there were multiple versions, cant remember if M4L or what they were exactly) thinking the same you said, but found even the most up to date version to be buggy. don't think it ever crashed Live, but i remember it being annoying enough (think some things wouldn't track correctly, some stuff couldn't be saved in a set? been years now...) that i removed it after trying a few different times.

just remembered there was a pretty solid little M4L stock sequencer that might come in handy for what you're trying to accomplish if i understand it correctly. i'm assuming it's still part of the M4L stock devices package. was a 'basic' sequencer but was pretty malleable, could change step lengths and chance/etc iirc. i'm 95% sure it was a stock M4L device....again, my memory is shit.

Edited November 1, 2020 by auxien

[thawkins]

Thanks.

What I want to do is record any MIDI clip, and then have faders to modulate every 1-to-Nth velocity that is hitting the device. So I can have an arpeggiator running or a sequence of any length and just tone down the velocity of every 3rd note out of 8 for example.

I could do this fine with Notemodulator but I guess something broke recently which is a shame.

[user]

25 minutes ago, thawkins said:

Thanks.

What I want to do is record any MIDI clip, and then have faders to modulate every 1-to-Nth velocity that is hitting the device. So I can have an arpeggiator running or a sequence of any length and just tone down the velocity of every 3rd note out of 8 for example.

I could do this fine with Notemodulator but I guess something broke recently which is a shame.

 

If I understand you correctly I think this is able to do what you want in the way you want to do it:

https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6204/velocity-and-api-step-sequencers-pack 

It costs $3,- though.

Re; diving down the m4l rabbit hole, yes it's another thing to get into and can be a huge time sink. OTOH based on your posts here in EKT you seem to be someone who has a specific workflow in mind and getting into m4l because of this can be quite rewarding. I have to be quite pragmatic when trying to improve or build a device but even the slightest customization can make a big difference in usability and enjoyment for me.             

edit; there's also a $2,- version that has just the velocity sequencer: 

https://gumroad.com/l/jKWlv

 

Edited November 1, 2020 by user

[thawkins]

Thanks. Those plugins look a little bit sketchy though - I wonder how well they integrate with Push and all that.

Honestly I do not have a specific workflow that I am after, it's more the opposite: once I get to a workflow, it lasts one week and then I need to change things around. Sometimes it seems that half of my projects are named "jam template" or "midi jam template" and consist of less and even less successful attempts of setting up a default template based workflow. Recently it feels that I am getting somewhere though.

With this NoteModulator experiment I wanted to have a way of "fading out" a MIDI track using note velocities and also having a quick way to mute notes (by way of modulating the velocity to 0) on Push, because I feel that the melodic step sequencer view on Push is insane and unusable for this purpose. Maybe I just need to spend some time getting to know it, but ehhh...

 

Damn I even messed up writing "insane" in the thread title, maybe time to take a break.

[thawkins]

Anyways, it seems that after I fixed my bespoke MIDI rack that added harmonics by way of the Chord device, and - crucially - also updated the Max version, the problems are gone now.

Thanks for the suggestion to go into the NoteModulator device to see what might be wrong - I would not have seen the "hey you can update Max" message otherwise.