Tutorial: Controlling Resolume Avenue with Ableton Live

[bart]

We did a Resolume presentation at the official Ableton Live 8 launch in Amsterdam last weekend. While preparing for this presentation we have written a tutorial on how to control Avenue with Live. It covers MIDI sequencing, triggering clips & columns, linking parameters and MIDI clock. We get many questions about synchronizing Live and Avenue so we hope this is useful for many of you. Leave a reply if you have any more questions!

[gpvillamil]

Great tutorial!

Don't forget the famous "Richie Hawtin" secret feature. It means that in some circumstances you don't need to set up a dummy clip.

If you have assigned a MIDI note as a trigger to an audio clip in session view, everytime you activate that clip it will actually send *out* its assigned MIDI, with the velocity set to the number of times it has looped.

From the Ableton forum:

Richie Hawtins "secret" Live feature is in since Live 4 for everyone:

create a file "Options.txt" in Library/Preferences/Ableton/Live4

write the line:

-MIDINoteFeedback

in it. If a session clip has been MIDI learned it will put out a note event when triggered, and a note event with velocity 1 per loop count and the note off on stop.

Thats all.

Robert

[gpvillamil]

Also I've had great success using Euclidean Rhythms as trigger tracks for clips:

Check out the original paper: http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publi ... /banff.pdf

And the Max/MSP implementation:

http://www.cycling74.com/forums/index.p ... oto=169877

You can run that patch under the Max runtime (free), it has a menu to let you choose the MIDI routing.

[gpvillamil]

Finally, some thoughts on connecting two computers via MIDI for linking Live and Resolume:

1. Just use a MIDI cable. If you are using a MIDI controller on each computer, you likely have access to an input and output port on each one (keyboard, UC33, etc.) Just run a MIDI cable from the output port of the Ableton controller to the input port of the Resolume controller. This is super stable with very low latency.

2. ipMIDI from nerds.de. This is a MIDI over Ethernet driver for Windows (paid) and Mac OS X (free). It works well cross platform. I have used it myself for gigs, connected over wireless. Unfortunately, not as precise, timing-wise, as option 1.

3. If you're using two Macs, then MIDI over Ethernet is built-in to the system.

4. If you're using two Windows machines, then try EthernetMIDI (http://www.linuxsampler.org/ethernetmidi/), which unfortunately does not relay the clock or TobyBears MIDIBag (http://www.tobybear.de/p_midibag.html - bottom of the page) which does, but is somewhat old code.

[bart]

Don't forget the famous "Richie Hawtin" secret feature. It means that in some circumstances you don't need to set up a dummy clip.

If you have assigned a MIDI note as a trigger to an audio clip in session view, everytime you activate that clip it will actually send *out* its assigned MIDI, with the velocity set to the number of times it has looped.

When I add this Options.txt I get this error message on startup:
The options file [Options.txt] contains an unknown option ‘-MIDINoteFeedback’ which will be ignored.

This clip MIDI note output actually works without the Options.txt but the problem is that it sends this midi note as soon as you click a clip to play and then again when it is actually launching. So Live sends it out twice where it should only send it when the clip is actually launched.

[gpvillamil]

Don't forget the famous "Richie Hawtin" secret feature. It means that in some circumstances you don't need to set up a dummy clip.

If you have assigned a MIDI note as a trigger to an audio clip in session view, everytime you activate that clip it will actually send *out* its assigned MIDI, with the velocity set to the number of times it has looped.

When I add this Options.txt I get this error message on startup:
The options file [Options.txt] contains an unknown option ‘-MIDINoteFeedback’ which will be ignored.

This clip MIDI note output actually works without the Options.txt but the problem is that it sends this midi note as soon as you click a clip to play and then again when it is actually launching. So Live sends it out twice where it should only send it when the clip is actually launched.

Ah, I think in recent versions MIDINoteFeedback is already enabled by default.

Check the velocity of the sent note to establish the difference between the trigger and the first-loop signal. I did this with a simple rule in MIDIOX. I think you can use a Velocity gate in Ableton as well to filter out the trigger or the first loop.

[gpvillamil]

What would be an awesome (and simple) feature that would facilitate this is the ability to manually enter MIDI assignments, not just in learn mode.

The reason is that if you are communicating between Live and Resolume via MIDI, then it might be useful to do this using MIDI channels, CC# and octaves that are *not* easily accessible via a MIDI controller. And if they're not easily accessible via a controller, then you can't use learn mode to assign them in Resolume.

For example, I have a UC33 which I use to control Resolume, this is always sendng on MIDI channel 1. However, any MIDI CCs which are controlled from Ableton I send on MIDI channel 11, to avoid clashing. It's awkward to set up the learned stuff on channel 11, since I have to change the channel number on the UC33, do all the learning, then switch it back.

So it would be awesome if there were the possibility of just typing in a note assignment directly, ideally in some kind of tabular interface.

[syzygy]

gpvillamil - have you looked at the xml files that resolume uses to store the midi mappings?

You could edit them yourself to set up the mappings that you want.

They look quite complicated but by setting up some mappings and looking at how they are stored in the files, I reckon it would be reasonably easy to set up the mappings that you want.

Dan.

[bart]

What would be an awesome (and simple) feature that would facilitate this is the ability to manually enter MIDI assignments, not just in learn mode.

You can already do manual MIDI mapping, just go into mapping mode, right-click the element that you want to assign and select either Create Note or Controller shortcut.