Send me in the right direction (hopefully) - Live MIDI q's

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Hi Everyone

This forum is so enormous I often don't know where to go. Maybe someone can suggest a solution, or send me to the correct subforum to ask this in.

What I am looking for is this:

I want to store a group of MIDI sequences, and then have the ability to step to and play the next sequence by sending a simple MIDI note or controller command to the MIDI application.

For example, I have a song with several parts - when I press a pedal on my midi controller (which is set to send a CC or note command), it would trigger the first part of the song to play through and then stop. When I press the pedal again, it steps to the next part of the song and plays that one through.

Basically, I want to play live with some midi backing but don't want it as fixed as a backing track - ability to flex a little, and also I would like to be controlling some live processing with midi, which I could not do with a backing track.

Runs on linux is a bonus. I don't have and can't afford a mac laptop, so OSX is out. Could do windows possibly.

Thanks for any help

BTW I am using a nord micromodular as my primary sound/processing source, along with other instruments processed through it. I was trying to program all of these sorts of things into patches in the nord, but I will be here all year just trying to coax it out of that thing.

[Antimon]

Sounds pretty much like the stuff Ableton Live excels at. You can run Live on Windows, as well as a Mac (which is out for you).

If you feel like programming and putting in a bit more work but getting a solution for free, you could try one of the free sound programming languages around. It shouldn't be too much of a hassle, and there are usually people around willing to help (we have a SuperCollider and a ChucK forum here at electro-music.com - I'm a ChucK user myself).

It's possible that there are other (cheaper or free) apps that does things like Live's clip launching stuff, but I don't know about any.

/Stefan

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Thanks Stefan,

Isn't ChucK more of a synthesis environment? I only have a very surface level understanding of what it does.

In the descriptions, it seems the emphasis is on audio, but it might just be because more people are interested in realtime synthesis.

I was looking into abelton... it seems it might do what I want... but I got mixed info on that.

the free part of PD or chucK are nice, though I would pay (a reasonable amount) for something that could do what I want without too steep of a learning curve (I've got plenty of projects, so heaping on learning a language/environment isn't on the top of my list of things to do).

Thanks

[Antimon]

ChucK is good at MIDI as well as timing, but yeah it has a steep learning curve.

Have you heard anything specific about Live that makes you doubt that one?

/Stefan

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When reading some things about the clip launching, I thought I read some people saying it isn't as versitile as one would hope.

One thing I was uncertain about was whether I would be able to "step" from sequence to sequence. I only have one footswitch available to do the triggering of the different sequences and my hands will be busy with guitar or another instrument. I thought it looked like you could trigger sequences with midi messages, but I didn't see a way to sequentially step from one sequence to the next.

I think I need to just install the demo and try it out. I downloaded it last night but haven't tried it yet.

[Antimon]

Ah OK, I haven't tried that way of triggering clips. The clip launcher has many settings, but it might turn out to be a bit tricky to trigger with just a single foot switch.

Live has its own forum, if you feel up to checking out some more: http://forum.ableton.com/forums.html

One way to accomplish stepping like this could be to combine ChucK with Live - ChucK would accept whatever MIDI message your footswitch sends and convert it to a sequence of MIDI note ons or CCs that in turn are sent to Live. You'd need a virtual MIDI device (IAC is built-in on the Mac, I think you can use MidiOx on the PC), but that kind of ChucK program would be simple enough to do - hell I could try throwing one together for you just to see if it works. It sounds like an interesting technique that I might want to try out myself (I also play some guitar and bass).

/Stefan