Max for Live

More Clox…. a quick and dirty ticker…

More Max 7/Max for Live meanderings…. Geek alert…

Last time I wrote about the counter based clock in Adlais Shift Register Sequencer:

how it works ok until you change it then return to 4/4 time. A quick google doesn’t help much either. At first I thought I should just find a way to reset it after each switch but you wouldn’t want to do that with your watch – it just proves it’s a crap watch…

Anyway, I said I had two solutions:

The first turned out to be a nightmare, not even a Sundial and I’m not going to show you, the second has a certain simple elegance…

But it is cheating really:

Here I got a Max multislider object for pitch control, it’s output multiplied by the Rangifier patcher, feeding a Clock patcher (The Rangifier just multiplies the 0 – 1 output of multislider to a useable MIDI note range)…

What’s inside the Clock patcher Dave?

Here:

It’s a live.step object… the standard Max for Live step sequencing object which I think is dead ugly, but it’s timing is pretty solid, see the standard StepSeqControl patcher:

What we get from this little setup is a nice simple step sequencer with rock solid timing, but accessing the clock between the transport object and live.step is onerous, and try applying a step shift to both the live.step and multislider simultaneously….

What it is good for is nice, quick pitch and modulation sequencing but i want a rock solid clock that allows me to intercept it at many points to produce a wide variety of timing effects… The question I had was ‘Where can i find the ticks for my clock from?’

A brief chat on Facebook and the answer was found, and the clue is in the question…

Next time I’ll tell all and I’ll release it in a significant free update for Adlais…

 

Posted by Dave Dove in K-Teck News

M4L: Thinking about clocks…

When building a Max For Live sequencer, clocks are a problem…

My ‘Adlais’ sequencer has a counter based clock:

The Metro object automatically synchronizes to Ableton Live’s clock, but only in that it counts upwards at the rate input – in this case 4n – from when Live’s transport is engaged. The plugsync~ object resets the clock when Live’s transport is stopped and restarted.

Well, that’s fine, you might say… and it is up to a point.

It is ‘in sync’ with Live’s clock, but not with Live’s transport, and that is a problem. If I were to set the number of steps in my sequencer to 5, step 1’s position will shift along the transport by on step per 4 beats, so:

 

Transport 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
Counter 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1

 

If I then switch back to 4 steps, this happens:

 

Transport 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4
Counter 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1

 

Which is what is happening with Adlais

And renders my upcoming percussion sequencer useless

So far I have found two solutions, one of which is elegant, the other is stupid….

Answers on a postcard please

Really, i would love to know your thoughts…

Posted by Dave Dove in K-Teck News