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brad_k
Junior Jammer
Joined: 12 May 2016
Posts: 3
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 Posted: Thu May 12, 2016 8:04 am Post subject: Real time kick/snare groove cues? |
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Hi. New to the forums but I've been using JS for a few months as a hobbyist bass player. For a while, I simply fired up Jamstix and played along with the drummer. Lately, I've started to experiment with programming and importing MIDI grooves. However, what I've found myself wanting to do lately is lead JS rather than follow it.
In my head, what I'd like to do is 1) play a groove on my bass, cue one or more loops, and/or start jamming with a friend; 2) use a MIDI controller to tap in a kick-snare (or more) groove in real time; and 3) have JS respond to my rhythmic cues, with the ability to change the groove as the jam session evolves.
How can I accomplish this in JS3? Is anything like this possibly on the roadmap for JS4? If I could finger-drum a simple beat in real time and have JS respond rather than having to pre-program grooves or stop playing to click boxes with a mouse, I would be in JS heaven.
Any thoughts? Dynamic and volume controls and the audio/midi jam features let me do a lot, but they don't quite let me accomplish what's described above.
THANKS MUCH!
P.S. If it matters, I'm running JS in Ableton Live and am mostly focused on live looping composition and improvisation. |
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chill_human
Junior Jammer
Joined: 09 Aug 2015
Posts: 17
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| Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2016 9:01 pm Post subject: Re: Real time kick/snare groove cues? |
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| brad_k wrote: | Hi. New to the forums but I've been using JS for a few months as a hobbyist bass player. For a while, I simply fired up Jamstix and played along with the drummer. Lately, I've started to experiment with programming and importing MIDI grooves. However, what I've found myself wanting to do lately is lead JS rather than follow it.
In my head, what I'd like to do is 1) play a groove on my bass, cue one or more loops, and/or start jamming with a friend; 2) use a MIDI controller to tap in a kick-snare (or more) groove in real time; and 3) have JS respond to my rhythmic cues, with the ability to change the groove as the jam session evolves.
How can I accomplish this in JS3? Is anything like this possibly on the roadmap for JS4? If I could finger-drum a simple beat in real time and have JS respond rather than having to pre-program grooves or stop playing to click boxes with a mouse, I would be in JS heaven.
Any thoughts? Dynamic and volume controls and the audio/midi jam features let me do a lot, but they don't quite let me accomplish what's described above.
THANKS MUCH!
P.S. If it matters, I'm running JS in Ableton Live and am mostly focused on live looping composition and improvisation. |
I do sort of the same thing. What I found works really well in Ableton is to have several groups of clips with a similar feel, lets say 4 groups of clips where group 1 is funk, group 2 is disco, group 3 is jazz, and group 4 is crazytown noise. Each clip would have a single note that is sent to Jamstix as a trigger, and you would run in LIVELOOP mode.
Then have follow actions for each Ableton clip in a grouping. So group 1 would have maybe 4 clips, and each clip has a follow action of "other" after 8 measures for instance. As the clips send trigger notes to JamStix and randomly select a new part, this keeps the drums and feel fresh.
Then if you midi-map the first clip of each group of JamStix-Command clips to a midi controller, you can change the feel of the jams as long as you have a group of beats that work for the current part. There is no programming beats on the fly, but I actually doubt you would want that anyway. So much of the feel of a part is in all the drummer nuances you select, and that's all situational dependent. I can jam for several minutes just layering guitar, bass, and keyboard sounds over a group of beats and the drums don't feel stale.
I also have a track sending a midi note for recompose once a measure, mostly to keep the fills sounding fresh. You have to offset the recompose from the 1, JamStix gets cranky if it has to recompose at the same time it is figuring out where it is when the loop point changes in LIVELOOP mode.
I also have a part for silent, and since I run JamStix -> DrumRack, I can use the silent part along with pre-programmed midi clips -> same DrumRack for parts where the drums don't change (parts of songs that are rhythmic hits, etc), the very beginning of songs, or the endings of songs. Ableton + JamStix + DrumRack = the HEAT!
All this being said, I have found that JamStix for this purpose is the very small majority of users, and JamStix crashes on me a lot while I'm composing. Once I get to the point where it just works after fresh boot up, it just works, but you have to save often. To get to the point where I am now, I needed to have the plugin fixed for LIVELOOP mode. Right now I'm running 3.6.5 Beta 2 [x32], I would hope that the fixes I got made it into the main source trunk, if not email Ralph and he'll help you out. He's a nice guy and very responsive to bugs. |
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brad_k
Junior Jammer
Joined: 12 May 2016
Posts: 3
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| Posted: Thu Sep 15, 2016 8:53 am Post subject: Re: Real time kick/snare groove cues? |
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| chill_human wrote: |
I do sort of the same thing. What I found works really well in Ableton is to have several groups of clips with a similar feel, lets say 4 groups of clips where group 1 is funk, group 2 is disco, group 3 is jazz, and group 4 is crazytown noise. Each clip would have a single note that is sent to Jamstix as a trigger, and you would run in LIVELOOP mode.
Then have follow actions for each Ableton clip in a grouping. So group 1 would have maybe 4 clips, and each clip has a follow action of "other" after 8 measures for instance. As the clips send trigger notes to JamStix and randomly select a new part, this keeps the drums and feel fresh.
Then if you midi-map the first clip of each group of JamStix-Command clips to a midi controller, you can change the feel of the jams as long as you have a group of beats that work for the current part. There is no programming beats on the fly, but I actually doubt you would want that anyway. So much of the feel of a part is in all the drummer nuances you select, and that's all situational dependent. I can jam for several minutes just layering guitar, bass, and keyboard sounds over a group of beats and the drums don't feel stale.
I also have a track sending a midi note for recompose once a measure, mostly to keep the fills sounding fresh. You have to offset the recompose from the 1, JamStix gets cranky if it has to recompose at the same time it is figuring out where it is when the loop point changes in LIVELOOP mode.
I also have a part for silent, and since I run JamStix -> DrumRack, I can use the silent part along with pre-programmed midi clips -> same DrumRack for parts where the drums don't change (parts of songs that are rhythmic hits, etc), the very beginning of songs, or the endings of songs. Ableton + JamStix + DrumRack = the HEAT!
All this being said, I have found that JamStix for this purpose is the very small majority of users, and JamStix crashes on me a lot while I'm composing. Once I get to the point where it just works after fresh boot up, it just works, but you have to save often. To get to the point where I am now, I needed to have the plugin fixed for LIVELOOP mode. Right now I'm running 3.6.5 Beta 2 [x32], I would hope that the fixes I got made it into the main source trunk, if not email Ralph and he'll help you out. He's a nice guy and very responsive to bugs. |
Just now caught this reply after a months-long hiatus from music making. THANK YOU for the tips. I will definitely try out some of these suggestions! |
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