Note Count Processor in Max For Live for Ableton Live

After I described the 'Triple Transposing Delay' with three different ways of connecting the delays together, as 'experimental', people seemed to like that, so my latest release is 'extremely experimental'!

Although it isn't a reliable guide, I've not seen anything like MIDIoneOF before, although, of course, you could do some of it using clip envelopes. In fact, I reckon that you can do almost anything by using clip envelopes, and I'm sure that those people who produce YouTube videos with apparently click-attracting titles like: 'Powerful Advanced Generative Techniques For Ableton Live', in huge white block capitals will be busy making yet more of those videos as I type, although they don't seem to use clip envelopes... When I did release a YouTube video on using Clip Envelopes, it got a wonderful review (Thanks, Darwin!) and over a hundred views, so maybe I should make some more...

MIDIoneOF

MIDIoneOF is the first of a series, because people seem to like it when there is more than one of something, and actually that's part of where the name comes from. I wanted to called it 'n of m' because it is based on permutations and modulo arithmetic, but mathematical notation like 'n of m' isn't very good for naming Max For Live plug-ins, and 'Nofm' sounds like onomatopoeia for eating food, rather than a cool M4L device. So 'One of' got the most votes, and may well be followed by 'Two of' when I have time to finish it. (I have no idea what the third might be called...) Me? Busy? I've been doing several major projects over the last few months (the TR-505 was just one of them) and I can't talk about some of them, but they might even see the light of day at some time. Over the years, I've become rather used to doing stuff that never has the media spotlight turned onto it, and I'd probably be surprised now if a glimmer of limelight ever appeared on any of my stuff. But hey, It means that sometimes I can hint abut something rare and unusual!

(*) MIDIoneOF counts notes as they arrive at the input, and then processes those notes in various ways. The main process is muting: you can set notes to be muted depending on two criteria: the note count length (from 2 to 16 notes), and the 'Mute Pattern' which you can set in the 16 light purple boxes (although you can only set ones which are within the note count length!).

The Mute buttons mute the note if they are grey, but let the note through if they are light purple, by the way.... 

So if the note count is set to 7 notes, then you can set mutes for note counts between 1 and 7 notes. There are 'Speedup' buttons to set all the mutes on ('AllOn') or off ('AllOff'), as well as a random selection.

The muting affects the notes as they pass through the device, and all of the timing is derived from those notes... Despite appearances, the mute buttons are only indirectly connected to the timing transport of Ableton Live - and if you don't quantise your notes, then there's no real connection at all. So what may look like a simplistic rhythmic accenting utility isn't quite that at all... It may look like a step sequencer, but the steps are the notes, not the transport timing. It's kind of a step sequencer turned inside out...

This is probably a good time to revisit the start of a previous paragraph (*). When I say: 'as they arrive', I mean that if you have a clip with 8 notes in it, then MIDIoneOF will get those 8 notes, and will process them in the order in which they arrive. So if the note count length is set to 7, then the first 7 notes will be processed (and muted or not, depending on the settings of the numbered buttons in the Mute Pattern. The eighth note will then be processed as the first note of the second set of 7 notes, and MIDIoneOF will continue processing in groups of 7 notes, until you stop Ableton Live.

The clip (or live playing) can include single staccato notes, legato notes, or chords, although there are limits to the speed and quantity of notes which it can deal with! Remember that I did say: 'Extremely experimental!'. Note also that this behaviour isn't what you probably associate with a step sequencer, but as I said, this isn't...

The second bit of processing is the 'AutoRandom' button, which saves you from the effort of clickng on the Mute buttons. You set a number (between 2 and 16 - a motif in this series) and after that number of multiples of note counts (so every n x 7 notes in the example I have used so far), the Mute buttons will be randomised. Properly random, and not one of those 'tailored randoms to make random more suited to human beings', so you can have everything muted, nothing muted, and these can repeat several times. Real random is like that, although in a lot of modern software it has been 'tailored' to suit people's expectation - the classic example is iTunes, where the Shuffle function does not play the same track twice, even though a random selection might play it twice, or even thrice, or even... It seems that people report it as a problem if a random shuffle plays the same thing twice... So you set the number of multiples of the note count length, and click on the 'AutoRandom' button, and off it goes. Setting the multiple to 4, 8 or 16 sounds kind of musical, because too much exposure to popular music seems to have convinced many people that everything happens every 4, 8 or 16 bars at 120 bpm in 4/4 time. Since the example so far has been every 7 notes, then try 7 as the multiple and you will find that it might feel slightly early.

The second processing is MIDI velocity. Since the note count and Mute Pattern know which number each note is, then we can do interesting things to the velocity value of the notes. The clue is the 'Rise/Fall' button, and this has an Offset rotary control on the left side, and a Scaling rotary control on the right hand side. Rise increases the velocity value as the note count increases, whilst Fall decreases the velocity value as the note count increases. This means that, as with lots of stuff that I do, velocity matters! You should try MIDIoneOF with an Instrument that is velocity sensitive... The important thing to remember is that the velocity processing happens depending on the note count length, so with the 7 note example and a Fall button setting, then the first note will have the largest velocity value, then the velocity will drop over the next 6 notes to the 7th note, which will be the quietest (lowest MIDI velocity value), and finally, the 8th note will then be loud again, after which it will drop for th next 6 notes, and so on. The 7 note cycle will repeat until you change it.

Note that all of the processing happens based on just the notes themselves. MIDIoneOF takes all of its timing from thosee notes, not from the bars and beats within Live. So if your clip has notes in a complex rhythm, then MIDIoneOF will process the notes in that same complex rhythm. As I said, you can feed your own playing through MIDIoneOF if you wish... And I'm not going to mention Olafur Arnalds here...

The final processing is Probability, which is independent of the note count length! One thing that I have realised is that 100% is not enough, and I'm looking at this to see if there is anything I can do, but adding in extra notes is quite tricky in real time...

There's also the slightly red '!' "All Notes/Sounds Off" button in case you need to stop errant hanging notes. This may well signpost this as an 'experimental' device regardless of how I tag it in MaxForLive.com...

And that's the MIDIoneOF device. Hopefully you haven't seen anything quite like it before... because I much prefer not to repeat things that other people have already done. There have been a lot of Max For Live devices recently which are just people re-making a device which is already on Max For Live. I think that time is too short to waste it re-coding something which is already available!

Inside

I won't bore you with a counter, and I won't bother explaining why the count is from 2 to 16 and not 1 to 16 (1 is the obvious minimum, but it is really boring using a count of one!). Instead, this is probably a good place to do another in the occasional series of 'Things that Max doesn't have a pre-made object for...'

In this case, it's those 'Mute Buttons' that are the source of the problem. To mute the MIDI note when any of the mute buttons are highlighted requires what I call a 'wide' OR function - a 16-input OR gate. This isn't standard in Max...which is not hugely surprising... Now I know that you can use Boolean logic to transform the gate, but as far as I can see,  this doesn't really do anything other than mean that a different 'wide' gate and extra inversions are needed. So what did I do? I made a 16-input OR gate using a tree hierarchy of 2-input OR gates. Yep, I resorted to 'brute force and ignorance' to save time and effort. Sorry.

Two things are probably notable in this sub-patcher. First, there's the left-most input, which sets all of the outputs to zero. I've had all sorts of 'difficult to track down' problems caused by the gswitch object when there's no input on one of the two inputs (This would be a 'floating input' if this was hardware, which it isn't...), and so this ensures that that won't happen. Second, there's my standard 'use a blink to make both inputs trigger the output' approach, which enables the ORs to ripple downwards from either side. I'm sure there's a better way to do this whole 'Wide OR' functionality, but I have't had a flash of inspiration yet... It works well enough for my purposes.

Links

YouTube video on using Clip Envelopes - Features Clip Envelopes - in a video!
All Things Modular - Inspired by Modular - Darwin's blog has some interesting posts in it! Including this one where it refers to the above video on clip envelopes.

Getting MIDIoneOF

You can get MIDIoneOF here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6436/midioneof

Here are the instructions for what to do with the .amxd file that you download from MaxforLive.com:

     https://synthesizerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/where-do-i-put-downloaded-amxd.html

(In Live 10, you can also just double-click on the .amxd file, but this puts the device in the same folder as all of the factory devices...)

Oh, yes, and sometimes last-minute fixes do get added, which is why sometimes a blog post is behind the version number of MaxForLive.com... and pictures may not always be the current version... but Schrodinger's cat's status is permanently uncertain...

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then implementing MIDIoneOF in a modular synth is just a step sequencer (or a ring counter in old parlance) driven by gates or triggers instead of a clock, some toggle switches for selecting the steps, and some velocity processing in a CV utility. About 5 modules by my count, giving an ME of 5. I hope that this blog post makes more people think about pulling out that patch cable from the clock input of the step sequencer and connecting it to a gate instead of an LFO or a Clock Generator. Modulars synths have cliches too! 

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Triple Flexible Routing Probabilistic Transposing Delay in Max For Live for Ableton Live

Sometimes, a MaxForLive device is right on the edge of not working, and normally I put it to one side for 'further investigation'. But every so often, an 'almost working' device is so cool that it goes along a different route: an experimental device with warnings. MIDIdelA3 is just such a device...

For a while now, I have been exploring the edge of the musical map that has 'Probability' on it, off to one side of a region called 'Generative'. But it wasn't until I combined probability with a much older topic, echoes, that things started to get really interesting. One of my very early echo effects was called 'Missing Echo', because it didn't put an echo on every note, and updating the concept with probability, as well as moving the delay into the MIDI domain, started to produce some useful results.

People have been playing around with echo and delay effects for a long, long time. One of the current 'leading lights' is Olafur Arnalds, an Icelandic multi-instrumentalist who has been using custom 'smart delay' software in live performance, and who recently collaborated with Spitfire Audio to release 'Stratus', a toolkit of software and a linked sample library that uses complex delays to augment live performance.

MIDIdelA3

MIDIdelA3 isn't complex, and it isn't anywhere near the functionality of Stratus, but it hovers at the edge of what my 2008 Macbook Pro can reliably accomplish in MaxForLive. It might be generously described as being 'far from perfect', and isn't really suitable for 'mission critical' use, but it is a fascinating glimpse into what is possible with MaxForLive. It has three identical processing sections, each with a delay, a transposer, a probability control, a velocity scaler and a loop switch. You can connect the three sections together in three different ways: in series, in parallel, and in a mix of serial and parallel. There are 20 memories, and a large rotary control that lets you select from those memories, so once you have set up the memories, then it can be used as a 'single control' device if you wish.

Setting up the memories sounds easy, but there's more to it than meets the eye. Having three different topological connections between the three sections is quite hard to get your head around, and the probability control has more effect that you might think, because when a note has an 80% chance of passing through a section, then that drops when it goes through a second section with 80% probability, and if it goes through a third section, then another 80% probability means that you aren't going to hear that triply-delayed note very often. Then there's the velocity scaling, which reduces the velocity of notes, and which is particularly important when you loop a section, because it keeps things stable, or almost does. Yep, this is one of those delays that can run away with itself...

Inside

I haven't used the MIDI Delay that Ableton include as one of the MaxForLive demos because it is too much like 'a maze of twisty little passages, all different'... Instead I have coded it myself using a different approach, and this probably explains why it 'almost' works - my programming is not very advanced, I'm afraid. But it does get close enough to being usable to be worth revealing, because I'm sure that there are better programmers out there who can improve on the concept...and like all of my software on MaxForLive.com, it is free and unencumbered by rights licensing restrictions.

The way that you are supposed to do operations on time-critical events is to time-stamp them as they arrive, and then work your way through a time-based list, so that they are dealt with in strict time order. If you look inside the Ableton MIDI Delay example MaxForLive code then that is exactly what you will find - and there's quite a lot of code in there...

I chose to do it using the much simpler 'cheat's' way. I used two 'pipe' objects, one for the MIDI Note Number values, and the other for the MIDI Velocity values. Normally, when time-stamping a pair of values like Note Number and Velocity, you would group them together as a single event, and give that pair of values a time-stamp. When using two separate pipe objects, then the Note Number becomes one event in a time-delay, whilst the Velocity becomes a different event in a different time-delay. You can probably see why this isn't a perfect solution! But, for 'quick and dirty', it kind of works, and it requires very little coding!

So for the three processing sections (Time Delay, Transpose, Probability, Velocity Scaling, and Looping) there are six pipe objects, arranged in pairs (Note Number, Velocity). These three sections are connected together using a set of 24 switches that do all of the routing for the three different ways that the three sections can be connected (serial, parallel, and a mix). The three connection diagrams look a little bit like the FM 'Algorithm' diagrams that the Yamaha DX7 had on its top panel, and they kind of show the same sort of routing, but nothing more than that.

Using it

Depending on the way that the three processing sections are connected, the basic explanation goes like this:

Connection 1 - the serial (top diagram) connection sends the MIDI messages through section 1 (and outputs delayed notes), then section 2 (and outputs delayed notes), then section 3 (and outputs delayed notes).

Connection 2 - the mix of serial and parallel connections (middle diagram) sends the MIDI messages through section1 and outputs delayed notes), and then through section 2 and 3 at the same time (in parallel) (and outputs delayed notes from both sections).

Connection 3 - the parallel (lower diagram) connection sends the MIDI messages through sections 1, 2 and 3 at the same time (and outputs delayed notes from all 3 sections.)

Each section has a separate Loop button, and the Velocity Scaling rotary control acts like the 'Feedback' control in an ordinary audio delay or echo effect. If the Velocity Scaling is set too high, then the processor will quickly become overwhelmed with too much data, and will stop working. This may cause strange noises, which may be loud! Please use the Loop buttons with care. If the device does become overwhelmed, then the 'All' button can be used to turn off any of the Loop buttons.

The Loop buttons can be turned on whilst the device is operating. So you can set up the controls, and then turn on looping for just one of the sections - this is very effective for creating rhythmic 'motifs' and other repeating sounds. The recommendation is that you normally have all of the Loop buttons set to Off, and turn one (or more) on to get a repeated motif for a short time, and then to turn the Loop button off again. This will keep the device stable.

If you have a transpose control set to anything other than the middle 'zero' setting, then using the Loop buttons will quickly cause very low or high MIDI notes to be produced - because the transposition accumulates for each repeat. If you set it for an octave, then after only a few repeats the notes will be at the limit of the MIDI range. Please use the Loop buttons with care when using the Transpose rotary controls.

The Time, Probability and Velocity Scaling rotary controls are not linear - half way round is not half the effect. This is deliberate, and is intended to provide the most control where it is needed. For example, the Velocity Scaling you will use most will be at around 70 or 80%. 100% may cause the effect to be overwhelmed, and is not recommended. Less than 60% will tend to produce only a small number of repeats (echoes).

Note that the Probability rotary control prevents notes from passing through a section. This applies to repeated echoes, so the Probability rotary control and Velocity Scaling rotary control will both reduce the number of repeats (echoes), and will help to prevent the device from being overwhelmed.

To store settings that you like in a preset 'memory', shift-click on the relevant grey square in the lower left hand corner. To recall a 'memory' preset, just click on the relevant square (it will change to white), or use the 'Preset' rotary control. If you use the 'Save' icon on the upper right of the device, then you can save your settings in a file inside Ableton Live, ready for use next time.

MIDIdelA3 is a sophisticated MIDI delay unit. It is capable of some interesting effects, including some that are not normally found in echo or delays that process audio signals (digital or analog). Please be aware that too many notes played at once, or high settings of Probability or Velocity Scaling may cause the processor to become overwhelmed, so take care. The red '!' round button is a placeholder for a future method of stopping the processing from becoming overwhelmed.

MIDIdelA3 sometimes behaves strangely with some instruments, and you may experience 'held' or 'stuck' notes. I am still trying to find out why this happens... For your first testing, please use a percussive sound that decays to nothing relatively quickly, rather than a sound that sustains.

Remember that this is an experimental MaxForLive device, and it is not perfect. Some of the links below may provide more robust, similar and more advanced versions of the effects that MIDIdelA3 produces, and should be researched if you want to explore this type of MIDI delay further.

Update

Since version 0.03 was published, I have spent a lot of time trying to find out why sustained notes caused so much trouble to this plug-in. Here's what I found...

The development of this MaxForLive plug-in started out as an experiment to see what it was like to have delay, transpose, and probability in a single device. Somewhere in there, the idea of putting feedback around it came up, and so I added the velocity scaling in an attempt to ensure that it would be stable. Adding feedback revealed some interesting things that I hadn't noticed up until that point: first, my bright idea to scale the velocity each time a note went round the delay loop, so that it would stop the device from running away, worked, but it didn't do quite what I thought it would. (My assumption (never assume anything!) had been that when the velocity value got scaled down to 1, then eventually a subsequent repeat would have the value zero, which is a note off, and that this would then stop the audio neatly. What actually happened was that it got down to a velocity value of 1, and then sat there, repeating over and over again.

This sort of situation often happens in programming, and there's a great temptation to just fix that aspect. Yep, that's what I did. I added extra code so that when the Note On MIDI message happened, the next note would have a velocity value of zero,  (which is the same as a Note Off MIDI message (, and hoped that everything would be fine. the problem with is is that the Note Off message is still in the pipe objects somewhere, and so you get two Note Off messages. And we know that Note Off messages are ignored...

There's a trap here. This is no longer a delay. It has become a Note Off message generator - and those Note Off messages just go round and round and round the feedback loop. And here's where I made the big mistake. I added more code to fix the problem that I had just created. I detected when a velocity value of 1 or less occurred, and then killed that whole message, so that Note On message never got turned into a Note Off message.

What I didn't test was what happened when a note was played that was shorter than the delay time. When I did test this in detail, I discovered that I got hanging notes because the Note Off messages were missing! And why were they missing? Because I was killing Note Off messages! The difficulty here is that Note On and Note Off messages should always be in pairs, and if you start to remove Note Off messages, then you have too many Note On messages and you get hanging notes. Worse still, I was turning Note Ons into Note Offs, so I had no way of keeping track of pairs of On and Off messages. There's no difference between a Note Off message and a Note Off message that used to be a Note On, except that one of these should be followed by a Note Off, and the other should not be!

If I removed all of the Max code that messed around with turning On messages into Off messages, then everything was fine when the Loop was turned off, but as soon as I turned the Loop on, then I got messages going round and round the feedback loop, eventually getting the velocity scaled down to zero, and then the Ons became Offs... For one moment, I did consider putting in a switch connected to the Loop button, so that when Looping was off, I didn't mess about with the Note Ons, but when looping was on, I did mess about. Then I realised that this would probably create a device that created hanging notes only when Loop was on...

At this point, I realised that I was trapped inside the loop of 'You have created unwanted behaviour by fixing unwanted behaviour...'.

A little bit of SWOT analysis told me that the expected behaviour of an echo with feedback was that it would go wrong if there was too much feedback. Unexpected behaviour was that an echo would cause hanging notes. Unexpected behaviour is bad, and so I ditched it. I took out all of the additional Max code that tried to remove the 'runaway' effect when you turned up the feedback too far. And this is version 0.04.

Oh, and I also fixed a few bugs in the horrendously complicated switching - you know those three diagrams that show the three ways of connecting the three processing sections together? Well, surprise surprise, there were bugs in there! For a single, relatively simple device, it is quite impressive that I could get so many things so wrong... 

I think version 0.04 should have less hanging notes...   

Other MIDI processing devices may exist...  

One thing that I have now noticed in other MIDI processing devices is that some of them only operate on the MIDI Note On messages, and so you have to pre-define the length of the notes that are produced. This way of doing MIDI processing had never occurred to me! It avoids any requirement for the processing of Note Off messages, and this should simplify the coding task, I think. If I ever get the time, then MIDIdelA3F may one day get released!                       

Links

Stratus, from Spitifre Audio, is probably the leading edge of current 'smart delay' technology, and combines it with a sophisticated sample library.
Midihub, from blokas.io, is a very nice MIDI event processor, patchbay and interface. (Yes, I know it should be MIDIhub, but they never asked me.)
BomeBox, from Bome Software, is a sophisticated MIDI processing, mapping and patching interface that can link a computer and MIDI devices over 5-pin DIN, USB, Ethernet and Wifi, and is also a MIDI host.

Getting MIDIdelA3

You can get MIDIdelA3 here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6400/mididela3mr

Here are the instructions for what to do with the .amxd file that you download from MaxforLive.com:

     https://synthesizerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/where-do-i-put-downloaded-amxd.html

(In Live 10, you can also just double-click on the .amxd file, but this puts the device in the same folder as all of the factory devices...)

Oh, yes, and sometimes last-minute fixes do get added, which is why sometimes a blog post is behind the version number of MaxForLive.com... and pictures may not always be the current version... but Schrodinger's cat's status is permanently uncertain...

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then implementing MIDIdelA3 can be approached from two different directions. A purist will use MIDI processing utilities to delay, transpose, probability-ise, and velocity scale the MIDI information, then connect it to a modular sound generation chain. A pragmatist will use three delays plus some additional processing and work in the analogue domain. Purists will require 3 or maybe 6 MIDI processing utility modules and may need to write some code for some solutions, giving an ME of 3 or 6. Pragmatists will require about three sets of 4 modules (voltage processor for transpose and velocity scaling, delays for the delay, utility for the probability, and a switch for the loop button), giving an ME of 12.

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