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I am in the process of creating an experimental liveset where I manipulate the pitch of the loops in realtime. I have mapped a knob on a MIDI controller to change the pitch of the sound, which is currently being handled via an audio effects rack for flexibility's sake.

It would be great if I could map a second MIDI control, such as a button, to the same knob to reset its position to 0. Unfortunately this seems to be much harder than I thought it would be for the following reasons:

  • Live doesn't let you map multiple MIDI controllers to a single object
  • Live uses the same mapping ranges for MIDI devices and the keyboard, so you can't use a keyboard key instead without screwing up the MIDI mapping for the original knob
  • The audio effects rack will let you have another effects rack inside of it, but you can't map the knobs between them and assign both knobs to different MIDI controllers
  • Even if I remap the MIDI button to send the same CC as the knob, Live will use the knob's mapping range, which means it won't act as a "reset" as I need it to

Is there any way to do this without having to resort to third-party software such as MidiOx? I'd really rather not have to run MIDI remapping software during my set.

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I understand that you will want to keep everything simple, but in the event you do need the functionality provided by MIDI-OX, you should know that it is quite reliable. I've used it live, and it has never crashed on me. – Brad Dec 13 '10 at 15:30
1  
@Brad, agreed, it is very reliable software. However, I'm on the Mac, which actually means MidiPipe instead of MidiOx. Also, every additional app/plugin means extra complexity. Simplicity = stability. – Nik Reiman Dec 13 '10 at 16:44

1 Answer

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There's a very good chance that you can do this with dummy clips.

Dummy clips are simple automations that set parameters via the Clip Envelope automation area. You can then trigger these clips via a midi trigger and they will reset the parameters for you.

The only issue with them is that you will struggle to use them on the same track as your audio clip, so you have to route the FX via another track (not a return).

After that all you'd need to do is set the MIDI mode of your controller to "pickup" and get used to manually zeroing the knob.

Tom Cosm has a setup that uses this (if I remember correctly) to save live 'presets' to his FX tracks, which you can see in his DJ megaset:

http://cosm.co.nz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=164:dj-megaset-10&catid=20:news

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