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MIDI control for a minimalist iPad live looping rig- AUM/Quantiloop/Drambo
Hello guys
First of all I’d like to thank all the people who post and share their knowledge on this forum. You showed me what is possible with an iPad coupled with apps from awesome developers! Just for context, I started my looping journey with a BOSS RC 505 loop station and a PO33 for a sampler/sound module. I like to goof around and create “music” on the spot for my friends in a live scenario. I mostly use my voice as instrument and I play some guitar.
Having discovered how powerful and portable an iPad + AUM for looping is, I decided to try and retire the bulky BOSS which not only needs external power source but which also doesn’t allow to bounce tracks. iPad also expands my FX and sonic options.
Now for my setup, I host Quantiloop Pro in AUM. My input passes through various FX (reverb, chorus, delay etc) and goes to two instances of Drambo armed with flexi samplers. One is for sampling my voice so that I can play it back chromatically using KB-1 keyboard. The second one records the input which I then slice using the Edit > Slice > Detect transients. These two Drambo instances are basically my PO33 on steroids. Next, everything goes into Quantiloop where my voice, “drum” samples and my keyboard are thrown into a loop.
The solution works great but I struggle with control as I need to do some menu diving in AUM and I need to switch back and forth between AUM and QL. I don’t have any external MIDI controller and ideally I’d like control everything in the iPad for the sake of portability and minimalism. I’m considering getting the MIDI twister for it’s versatility and the knobs but I believe that I could achieve good results with Mozaic and KB-1.
Here are my questions:
1. Can one control QL using virtual MIDI inside AUM (internal keyboard/ KB-1)? I only see an option for using hardware controllers.
2. Is it possible to automate Drambo using Mozaic so that flexi sampler would record when a button is pressed, stop recording upon release and the slice the sample by transients automatically right?
Thank you in advance!
Tom
Comments
If nothing works try Midi Fire To route from Aum to the virtual midi of QL
Yes, that is totally possible. MIDI is MIDI. It doesn't matter if it's coming from hardware or software. Bring up the routing matrix in AUM and route the internal keyboard or KB-1 along the top to Quantiloop along the side.
Sorry, there's no midi controllable way to slice samples in Drambo, so Mozaic will be no help there. Auto-slice on record stop would be a killer feature worth requesting over on the Drambo forum.
That makes sense, I’ll try to route it again then and if not I’ll give MIDI fire a go.
I initially bought ReSlice by Virsyn to cover the autoslicing bit. Sadly I learnt that the auv3 instance doesn’t allow to record any input. You can only load a prerecorded sample. Guess it’s going to be a manual step then.
As a workaround I’ve found using L7 looper alongside ReSlice AUv3 to be nearly as good and almost as quick as recording straight in.
Record loop in L7, then one long press on loop and tap ‘export‘, one tap ‘copy’, then switch to Reslice and ‘paste’, super quick to do.
Thanks for the tip, Steve. If I ever get L7 then I’ll check it out.
As for my previous questions I managed to route virtual MIDI into QL as wim suggested. I had to be more specific on defining the message. Mozaic came to the rescue- truly an awesome app! I’m now trying to create a custom MIDI script so that I can have most of the control over my rig within Mozaic.
Do you do this live?. I’d love to see it in action.
Yes, I’ll record something and post here once I have my setup ready. It’s liberating to just do everything on the spot but to do that efficiently you need to have good control over your system. I found that wim creates awesome Mozaic patches which are very flexible.
@wim I found your basic midi controls 1.1 patch which is great. Any idea if it’s possible to extend the pad functionality so that when the CC function is selected you could change the behaviour of a pad between CC toggle ( Value 0 or 127) and static CC value?
Humm ... I went to make this relatively simple modification and found that some update to either Mozaic, AUM, or iOS has introduced flakey behavior on the pads. When I hit a pad, CPU goes over 100% briefly, and only occasional messages are sent.
I do have some inefficient code on the pads labeling, but it didn't cause any issues in the past. I need to revamp some things, so it will take a bit longer than I expected. Definitely needs to be fixed though.
It would be helpful to know what iOS version you're on and whether you see the CPU meter spike to 100% or more when you hit a pad. I'm on iOS 13.7.
Hey wim, thanks for quick response!
Just tested the script and I believe that there might be something going on. I loaded a single instance of Mozaic in AUM and nothing else. When I press a pad DSP jumps by roughly 20 to 30%. On the other hand I also loaded Mozaic in a session where I have multiple things running (MixBox, Drambo etc) and the spike was less noticeable.
I’m on 14.2, iPad Air 4.
Thanks for the report. I optimized the code that was causing the CPU spikes, so I think that problem is fixed. I've also added "CC Constant" mode to the pads. This will send only the ON value rather than Toggling between 0 and 127. There's also a setting now for ON value in case something less than 127 is needed. OFF is always zero.
I don't think I introduced any bugs, but let me know if you see anything weird going on. Be sure you see Basic MIDI Controls v1.2 when you've re-downloaded and loaded the script into Mozaic.
Works like a charm, thanks!