I’ve never really tried MIDI sync but recently put together a small setup with Move, A4mkii and a laptop running Live, with Move as the master. I’ve run into a few issues that I didn’t anticipate and I’m wondering how other people deal with them.
First of all since the bpm drifts around when synced, the audio I’m recording into Live gets messed up. Does the daw always have to be the master? How do you handle this?
Second, the bpm doesn’t get saved into my Live set or my A4 patterns, so I have to remember to manually change them in each place. But if I do that what is even the point of sync? Should I just use midi transport only and manually set the bpm on each device?
Third since the bpm isn’t set on each device every time I hit stop the A4 will switch back to whatever bpm it was set at before and all of the delay tails shift and it sounds really annoying. Again it seems like I just have to manually set and save the bpm everywhere.
Overall I’m just feeling like sync isn’t really that helpful or usable due to these quirks, but am I missing something. Is there a better way I could set this up?
The recording is often out of sync because of processing time in the daw. I think Ableton say reduce the sample rate in its settings to resolve this. I had so much trouble with this I stopped using Ableton. It is profoundly frustrating. There are other threads with help on this point.
The other two problems sound like your settings in Ableton aren’t quite right. Ableton help pages are pretty good.
Sorry I don’t mean the latency issue I mean that when Live is synced to an external midi clock and I record audio into it, the small tempo fluctuations also get recorded as tempo automation and when I play it back the audio warbles all over the place because it’s set to repitch mode. Easily fixible by turning off warp but it’s just annoying and I wonder how people deal with the issue or if everyone just keeps the daw as the master.
I guess PCs tend to not being ideal in receiving accurate midi clock signals per se, am I right? I use an e-rm multiclock that sends out clock and transport signals to all the different devices, all the arrangement is done in the machines and Ableton is just used to record everything lineal, warp turned off on all recorded clips/samples, basically just like a digital tape recorder with no need for its own quantization, just mixing, muting or cutting stuff out. There is even a function to send an audio sync signal to Ableton, especially because it is supposed to be more accurate then feeding midi into the daw but I don’t really have a need to use it. Sorry if this is probably not very helpful.
That’s similar to what I’m trying to do, just using Live as a tape recorder. So on your various different devices are all of your patterns just some random bpm and only the one you’re using as the master saves the bpm? Or you’re just jamming and recording it live and not saving anything?
yes just the master (in my case the multi clock, but could be any of the machines) sets the bpm, all machines follow & act as slaves, bpm for every song stays the same anyway during the song. Ableton is default 120 but doesn’t matter, since it’s not part of any quantization.
If you have a DAW involved it’s usual to have it be the master clock.
If your Elektron device reverts to its own tempo when you press stop on live it suggests live isn’t sending clock when it’s not running. You should be able to change this in the midi settings.
Are you using overbridge for the A4 or an interface?
The way I setup is checking my driver error compensation and i add a vat kick with zero latency then I pan my vat to left and my midi to the right and record and do the final adjustments
Beware if you record a audio steam from master it will introduce latency if you have plugins on master channel so what I do is creat a group with all sounds and record from the group with zero latency
My kicks are always on point with vst and all my hardware.
I’m using Move as the master, A4 is synced to it, and then Live is synced to A4 via overbridge. But good to know that it’s not normal behavior. Maybe it’s a Move bug which wouldn’t be surprising since its midi sync implementation is pretty new.
So normally if you have say a bunch of different elektron boxes synced together when you hit stop on the master the others remember what tempo they’re supposed to be at?
Yes maybe a quirk of Move. When I do a basic midi sync of my Elektron gear to Ableton via an interface it always works just right. Could you sync both to your computer instead?