MPE in Ableton Live 11

Software
22

Wavetable , Aalto - yes.

Plasmonic … I don’t know, if its an MPE enabled VST. yes, should work.

Striso, should be fine - any MPE controller :slight_smile:

where did you see this? Ive not see this.
I don’t think this is part of Live… sounds like its an instrument parameter?

I’ve not seen anything smoothing… (though of course, Im sure it only record the automation at a certain level of detail) … in fact I hope they give us simplify envelop functionality, to smooth it out a bit :wink:

above, Ive listed what is currently MPE enabled.

overall I think its quite a similar approach…
however… things thats seem a little different (and improved)

  • you can see all expression at once (in bws 3.03 at least) , you can only see one expression type at at time
  • its using abletons ‘standard’ automation editor, so when you edit, you can not only add points, but draw in shapes, or use curves.

its this better automation editing that I think makes it more attractive to edit the data… though Id want to be able to smooth out the data first… given otherwise it’ll just be a ton of data points.

I do think that bitwigs ‘modulator’ approach is fantastic… though I think this (in mpe context) only works for internal instruments. then we have things like ‘The Grid’… which I really like.
but we are then into a more general ableton vs bitwig debate.

at a random stab (and I believe this generally) … I think
Ableton has the edge for editing/recording
Bitwig has the edge for sound design exploring. (*)

(*) of course, ableton has M4L up its sleeves for this, but its not as quick n’ easy (imho) , which means Im much less likely to use it (even as a geek :wink: )

but I love both… and do plan on upgrading my BWS license to latest version.

oh, completely ‘off-side’ , I think Cubase possibly still has best MPE editor … but I find the rest of it a bit too complex/heavy for my own personal use.

5 Likes
23

Thanks for the reply !
About rise and fall, i saw it here :
https://youtu.be/zAisG2rrH_Q

You have access to smooth rise & fall ( mpe control device, bottom right corner, little arrow)

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This thread was illuminating for me—a user of Bitwig Studio & the Sensel Morph for a controller—who just noticed the Live 11 MPE news. I might try to get the Live 11 upgrade because I am not a power-user of DAWs and as such have found that the “tutorial market” for Bitwig Studio is very low and not competitive as opposed to Live where there is thousasnds of people competing to make money off of online courses that teach how to do every little thing in Live. I assume that Udemy and other course sites will be full of courses, including MPE tutorials, that would help me finally learn quickly enough to get some momentum in my production.

If that happened, I’d probably end up leaving Bitwig Studio behind, mourning the fact that I spent the full cost of the DAW without ever getting into it.

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If you’re not a power user of DAWs I would go for Logic (EDIT: assuming you have a Mac??). Ableton has yet to arrive at MPE, then deal with the obligatory lacks and improvements. Bitwig is pretty good with MPE but honestly I’ve never understood their paying model.

With Logic’s last updates there is nothing it can envy to the other two above. MPE works out of the box (you might have to chase some presets) and there are plenty of tutorials out there.

I bought Live in the rush, upgraded for a lite version, but I’m not a power user either, so I ended up “returning” it.

26

I’ve not kept up with Logic’s recent changes… does logic now have per note editing?
(when was this introduced?)
last time I tried, its was all still channel based which is not very practical.

Ableton… the beta seems very usable to me, and Ableton are very frequent with (point) updates.

Bitwig, yeah, Im not a fan of their licensing model…
in fairness, though, actually it’s worked out quite well for me…
I don’t pay every year, I just ‘re-subscribe’ when they do something interesting (and its on sale - which is quite often :wink: ) - I think with Bitwig, you have to try to remove yourself from the mindset of being on the ‘latest’ version… i.e. if the version you are on is stable working, stay on it for a while - I do find this difficult!
(that said, with changes happening on macOS, I do play to update by subscription when its next on sale)

don’t get me wrong, Logic is extremely powerful and excellent value (no upgrade costs, unless they ever decide to make it Logic Pro 11) - its also a very ‘traditional daw’ (despite recent clip changes)- so thats a matter of taste.

but in @Photosynth case… if you have Bitwig, I’d stick with it… its extremely powerful, and has lots of thing going for it.

anyway, daw selection is probably subject of another topic.
at the end of the day, with any of these daws you can make great music… unlikely the daw is preventing that !

1 Like
27

I really don’t know as it’s not a feature I would use.

I’m sure Ableton is a very nice piece of software. Bitwig has worked for me too. Maybe I will upgrade one day (on sales) but focusing on one daw keeps me on track.

Sorry for the off-topic

28

If you’re not a power user of DAWs I would go for Logic (EDIT: assuming you have a Mac??)

I do not :smile:

I’m running Windows 10 and almost all Windows/Android devices except for the iPhone SE 2020 I purchased to be able to try out the Glover and Gliss software for testing out the concept of a MI.MU glove released next year by Imogen Heap & co.

I digress.

Bitwig is pretty good with MPE but honestly I’ve never understood their paying model.

You know, that’s a great point. I began my journey on FL Studio at age 15, I think, so to be 30 now and have even bought into Bitwig in the first place, I’m embarrassed. (Especially since I’ve also used Cockos Reaper a lot, even on contract work with professional editors who also use it, and it’s an entire DAW for $80 flat fee forever.) I’m so embarrassed to say that I really only went all-in on Bitwig Studio because Ableton wasn’t supporting MPE at the time and my other options (Cubase, Studio One, etc.) are DAWs I’ve tried but didn’t feel right for me.

And now, here is Ableton 11, finally supporting MPE. I wish they would have expressed that last year so I could have just bought Ableton and saved my money. Is there a way to sell Bitwig Studio licenses? :sob: :laughing:

I think it’s for more well-learnt and sound design types of producers and I’m more about tossing together all sorts of virtual instruments in Kontakt, Output plugins, etc. to find eclectic novelties in music and audio. In other words I chase after uniqueness in arrangement, instrumentation, rhythm and expressive / MPE tracking, rather than obsessive tweaking of synth paramaters. If only I’d known about Live 11 back then…

29

I asked the people at Ableton about MPE when version 10 came out. The did answer and it was a no, so I moved forward. But hey, not it’s here. Still, the sound sources that compelled me most are the AAS physical modelling instruments but, at least for now, there is no prospect of that.

Anyway, good luck in your choice. I’m happy that MPE is spreading all around.

30

So, fellow beta people…

Have you found a way, outside of the “MPE Control” device, to adjust pitch bend range for the clip editor?

It displays the bend lane scaled to the piano roll, which is great, but it seems hard coded to +/-48 steps. And some of my synths max out at less than that.

“Well, the ‘MPE Control’ device can scale it,” you say.

And I point out that the MPE Control device requires max for live.

Is there a solution for people who bought Live Standard?

(There has to be one. Right? I’m just blind?)

31

is this what you want?
Screenshot 2020-11-18 at 13.37.35

Screenshot 2020-11-18 at 13.36.37
Screenshot 2020-11-18 at 13.36.37968×586 57.6 KB

options for range are : +/-2 , 12, 24,36 48, 60,72,84, 96st

(and yes, its per track)

edit: heres a couple of ‘fun facts’, which Ive only just noticed…

  • the hightlighted blue box actually shows the pitchbend range, so if its +/-12st , it shows an octave either side. ( I’d not noticed, since by default its +/-48, it just all looked blue to me in my window)
  • if you alter the range, the values entered are relative to range if range was +/-2 st and you have it set at max (+2), then if you switch to +/-12st , then it will now be at +12st … what this shows us is Live is storing pitchbend value (ie. +8191) not semitone values, these are interpreted . this makes sense, but shows that we still need to becareful to correctly specify PB ranges on our controllers and sound sourcs.

edit: a couple more fun facts…

  • capture midi works with mpe
  • the expression editor has some neat featuers - eg. you can grab a notes expression, and scale it and offset it. so if you become a bit over excuberant, you can tone it down a bit

going back to an earlier point… (smoothing)
I suspect Live is doing a certain amount of smoothing of the input data (data is a bit smoother than expected) - though hard to say for sure…

MPEControl…M4L (only suite!?)
as stated previously, there are only about 11 MPE presets currently (Im sure this’ll grow) but, I notice every one of these uses MPEControl (so only Suite compatible?!)
this is not because its ‘needed’ - you can use (e.g.) wavetable mpe without it, works fine.
BUT i think the issue is, whilst you can scale the input, you have no ability to shape it, e.g. you cannot put a ‘log curve’ on it - so I think the preset designers wanted a bit more control, hence MPE Control.

makes me wonder, if its so vital, if Ableton might create a non m4l version of it, so that standard licenses have something- perhaps this is why we only have a few mpe presets, would make sense if there is an unfinished device that will be used for final version!

of course, all speculation. also many expressive controllers have ability to fine tune response curves, so not the ‘end of the world’

3 Likes
32

Perfect! Yes, that’s exactly what I’m after.

My only remaining qualm with the current implementation is… hard to explain.

Non-MPE MIDI, if you trigger a particular note while that note is still playing, Live will terminate the first note before attacking the second one. This can be annoying at times, but it’s generally appropriate. (It prevents stuck notes which, in a single-channel paradigm, are possible.)

MPE shouldn’t do that. Because notes are on different channels, and don’t conflict with each other.

But, Live’s MIDI clip does truncate that first note, and it discards all subsequent expression data associated with it.

So if you had a guitar overlay on Joueé, for example, and finger the same note on two strings, Ableton will abruptly end one of the resulting note, and ignore that string until you trigger another note on it.

(I filed a bug report. They closed it and suggested making that a feature request.)

I wish I had found that the other day.

(I was working in Live 10, and ended up editing a ton of aftertouch data by hand. Had I known that was an option, I might have migrated this song first.)

33

yeah, this is driven by ‘piano mentality’ … a note can only be pressed once.
unfortunately, this is pretty much widespread, even in daws and vsts supporting MPE.

I used to comment on it, but gave up, felt like battle Id never win…
(esp, in daws using piano rolls… where they will struggle to represent two of the same note being played)

perhaps one day when MPE is in widespread use, and developers are more in ‘refinement’ phase then its worth revisiting… but at the moment, I suspect we should be happy for what we get :frowning:

in fairness, I slightly ‘tripped over it’.
I knew in Live 10 they’d added a lot of features for automation editing, and wondered what they’d included in the expression editor…
I found the offset quite quickly but the scaling, I did by accident and couldn’t reliability reproduce it…

offset is done by getting close to the automation line (but not close enought to add a point) , then dragging.
scaling is similar, ensure all points are selected, but then be just outside the region of the note expression (to the right) the start dragging.

Ive a suspicion this might still be a bit ‘work in progress’ , since its takes a bit of ‘practice’ to do this, its not very intuitive, as there is not alot of visual indication that you are in the right position.

edit: created a suggestion (L11-SUG-0662) to improve the UI to make it a little more intuitive

2 Likes
34

I keep forgetting and just eyeballing it, but I did find a keyboard toggle (probably “shift”) which ensures that your mouse-and-keyboard bends land exactly centered on your target pitch.

That’s probably worth engraining in muscle memory.

35

“because it blocked other functionality that we were counting on.”.
I am curious, what are you referring to?

1 Like
36

Two bits of clarification. The “it” in question is Ableton routing every MIDI signal to channel 1, and the “we” was max for live developers (and users of max for live devices).

So, “other functionality” consists of two parts:

INPUT
We need a way to receive MIDI signals from different sources in max for live, and to differentiate between those sources. Sending and receiving on different MIDI channels is a well established mechanism, considered standard for 30 years now. But that’s never been available in max for live, because Ableton filters out channel numbers.

Examples:

  • A controller has pads and keys. The keys are on channel 1, the pads are on channel 10. We could use the pads to configure the keys, if we could tell the pads apart from the keys. But they’re just notes; one set of pitches, received on one channel.

  • MIDI clips provide a simple way to store information outside of your device. You can trigger those with scene launches, with follow actions, etc. And you can use other devices to vary that info. It simplifies a lot of things. But if your device also requires input from a MIDI controller, there’s no way to differentiate between this control data and the notes that you’re playing.

OUTPUT
We also need a way to control multiple synths from one centralized device. As with the first point, sending our signals to different MIDI channels would solve that, but Ableton also routes the output of our devices to channel 1.

Examples:

  • Multi-timbral sequencing.

  • Multi-timbral anything.

  • sending visual feedback to a grid controller, independent of the notes you’re playing

Anyway…

Because MPE is inherently multi-channel, it’s been a long-standing hope that enabling MPE would mean removing that incredibly destructive and limiting filter.

It does not. They simply added a different filter.

37

I guess the approach they took was easier to implement.

The issue is we can not see their code base so we don’t know how much upheaval it is to start sending around midi channel.

Also their approach is not too dissimilar to bitwig or cubase - to attach expressions to notes, to not incorporate the voice concept.
iirc this also matches what’s going on with vst3 and note expression.

That’s not to say I wish Live would ‘pass thru’ midi channel, I’d have found it useful quite a few times - but I’m happy they have not let difficulties in this area prevent them implementing mpe.

38

Honestly, I think they chose the right approach for MPE, and for MIDI 2.0. It prevents a million nightmares that we’ve never considered. (merging two MPE clips to a single stream, for example, requires some serious planning and/or preproduction otherwise.)

It’s not perfect – they absolutely need to fix the “two notes on different channels can’t coexist at the same pitch” bug, and that’s not a small effort. But on the whole, it’s really well thought out.

Anyway. We have to regard non-MPE multichannel as a separate feature request now.

1 Like
39

yeah I agree…

unfortunately, the two notes ‘issues’ is I think unlikely to ever be solved… (*)
it’s the same in other daws as well, all comes from the ‘piano roll’ model/ui prevalent in daws - perhaps trackers could be different.

(*) of course, Ableton’s own Push could theoretically support this, but again , zero interest / acknowledgement.

40

They’ve never been big on acknowledging their direction.

But they have added support for poly aftertouch in 11, and stopped disabling that in Push and Push 2.

Based on that, and some of their other changes, I think Push 3 is going to borrow a few ideas from Polyend Medusa.

…but, that’s not going to affect this issue.

Really, we need a six channel MIDI guitar to gain widespread acceptance before they’ll even see this as a problem.

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41

Guitar is the way to go, no doubt about it. Not every instrument should be thought for both hands doing the same thing, like the keyboardists do