Hey, working on developing live improv inside ableton, and was wondering if there was a max patch out there that could maybe interpret transients and spit out midi. My thought is to trigger drums this way to help make percussive rhythm on the fly. Some of my approach to playing live has me looping off grid and off the standard meter so just creating a beat from scratch while everything is running and then trying to work that into the current… cadence or polyrhythmic thing I’ve got going on is too fiddly for me at this point.
Was thinking something along the lines of like fft analysis where over a certain threshold triggers a midi note. I also see there’s the built in “Melody to Midi” option for clips, but this can turn out a little too dense or detailed and then I have to spend time paring it down first before dropping it on drums. Any thoughts?
Posted in the Ableton Live 11 thread
"Got access to the Beta today … lots of great improvements and the new devices are cool ( hydrid reverb and spectral delay especially ). The redesigns on some of the older devices are also welcome ( Collision and Redux in particular )
But it’s that small new tab in the expression control device that got me the more excited … 6 random values synchronized with the note input …
"
Would something like this be able to do what you want? Map incoming MIDI information to various parameters or possibly notes?
That would be one half of the puzzle for sure, but I think the real answer is I didn’t realize there is a “Drum to Midi” option, and if I use that on melodic content it gets fairly close to the result I’m looking for 
Especially considering it constrains the results to the drum trigger octave, so less work in a live setting getting the result shaped to taste
What that work for you on the fly though? Do you record the MIDI information then process it manually while everything’s running? I’d check to make sure that doesn’t cause any CPU hiccups. It shouldn’t but I could see something like this causing minor hiccups while everything’s running.
I am noticing that it will let the audio run in the background while it processes the clip but you’re probably right, the second it creates a hiccup and all the playing loops end up a few MS off from the source synth that will be a mess… so maybe still finding or making a M4L patch to do a basic from of drum to midi on the fly is still the better option
What about a combination of Expression Control and Sampler? You can create keyboard and, I think, velocity zones. That would probably get you where you’d like to go.
EDIT: I don’t think you would necessarily need Expression Control if you just use velocity mapping in Sampler. That would mimic your FFT thresholds to trigger things. Assuming of course you wanted to employ samples creatively.
