New Challenge: Is This Even Possible?

Hey everybody, first time poster here and its going to be a lengthy description and a definite challenge. Ive gotten the midi translator for 1 simple, specific task, which I have figured out and have put in use. Now that I see the possibilities of what this program can do, I thought Id see if any of you out there might be able to figure something out that Im not sure is even possible.

Here's the gist:

I am in a band that uses Ableton Live extensively. We use it to create and play backing tracks as well as controlling multiple lights and a led curtain. For those of you familiar with Ableton, I have been doing all of this through arrangement view. Now, I am in the process of switching everything over to clip view. This will allow us to have a more streamlined show as well as being customizable during performance. I will be launching each backing track as a scene so that it fires off everything necessary at the same time. Ableton users: most of you know that if you name each scene with "bpm xxx" in the name, Ableton automatically switches the tempo to whatever bpm is listed. Therefore, if I launch "Song A - 120 bpm"...ableton will play the backing track and our click track at 120. If I would launch "Song B - 80 bpm", as soon as Song B launches, Ableton will immediately switch the tempo to 80 bpm. For our situation, if we wanted to do medleys on the fly, this would make the song changes very abrupt and awkward instead of being smooth and streamlined. There is the dilemma.

Now that you have a general idea of whats going on.........here's my question/challenge:

Is it possible, with Bomes, to somehow make it so that, say, over the course of 2 measures, it can automatically slope the tempo from one scene to the next?

For example: "Song A - 120 bpm" is playing at 120 bpm and we decide we want to go right into "Song F - 100 bpm". Is it possible to set it all up so that, when I launch "Song F - 100 bpm", Bomes automatically slopes the tempo down so that right when "Song F - 100 bpm" starts, the tempo is then smoothly transitioned from 120 to 100?

I hope this makes sense. I also would be very excited to see an answer that isnt, "cant be done". I know that there a lot of incredibly smart people on this forum so I hope somebody might be able to at least point me in the right direction.

Thanks everyone and I hope to get some feedback!

Yes, this can be done, it just won't be easy. TO really help, though, I need to know what controller you're using.

What you can do is, based on the current scene you're in, define the BPM as a global variable. When you select the second scene you will have a timer start counting that global variable down until it hits where you want it and then the second scene kicks on only after.

So yeah, there's good news here

Thanks, DvlsAdvct, this is great news and very exciting! I dont mind if it wont be easy, I enjoy the challenge and I love learning new stuff.

The controller I will be using to select the songs is that Akai APC40.

As of right now, the only things I have taught myself with Bome's is simply MIDI note to CC conversion so, Im still fairly new. I would appreciate any help. Instructions dont need to be monkey-stupid but, with a slight newb in mind.

Thanks again!

I figured it was going to be the APC40.

I don't have one anymore so it's going to be a lot of blind testing, but we'll figure it out.

There is a lot to this, however. I'm not sure if you can do this while in the APC40's Ableton mode. You MAY need to go into its MIDI mode, but I'll tap some of our APC40 experts to be sure. You can experiment with any other controller, or with the MIDI mode on the APC40. What you need to do is set a CC command to the MIDI clock. When you select scenes it will change what this is, but that's fine.

You are going to set a translator for each scene button in MT with no output that defines a global variable. You will then press the next Scene button. Based on the current tempo variable, MIDI Translator will know how many times the timer has to trigger to get it to the correct tempo. Only when it gets to the correct tempo will it trigger the next scene. I need to look into how Ableton handles the CC messages for tempo, cause right now I can't remember.

Does that make sense?

I think Im following you. Im off to a gig now so I wont be able to mess around with it until tomorrow, but it def looks like a step in the right direction. Thank you very much, I really appreciate the help!

Not a problem at all. Let me know where you get hung up.

heres a cool way to do it inside ableton:

theres actually a better guide somewhere, i just cant remember where...

http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/pro ... eton-live/

then you can use bomes as the trigger

Thanks Ikay. Im actually already doing that with a few songs that have tempo changes within them. Very handy! And DvisAdvct, I still havent had the chance to give your ideas a try. Hopefully Ill be able to get to it on Monday or Tues. Thanks again!

Actually, you can use the dummy clip idea in conjunction with MT as well. You can have the on message for the clip trigger the scene as well and gradually fade it in. OR you can have the off message from the clip (once the tempo is set correctly) force MT to send a trigger for the scene. That might be a lot easier than dealing with the CC messages.