Song mode is working out fairly well. Starting to integrate an Ableton project.
On the MD, CTRL IN = ON lets me jump around the song on Ableton’s side and MD automatically stays in lockstep. A4 does the same without addl. configuration. (I’m using it for bass and pads.)
However there was a problem. Ableton sends MIDI clock to everything, when all we need is Song Position Pointer (and just to MD) since MD is the clock source. So the other devices were playing 2X speed unless I turned off sync output. I set up a virtual port that’s connected only to the MD and I set Ableton to send sync through that instead of the MIDI interface’s “Sync Out” which goes to all ports. Thankfully, A4 is still picking up SPP … maybe MD is forwarding it??
“Section” pattern changes will be automated in Ableton, a bar ahead. ESI, M:C, SE-50 will respond to these.
M:C requires manual pattern change when jumping to another section. But it is responding to PC changes as the song plays.
I’m considering the idea of an audio-clip-based backbone that stands on its own so that even if I mess up things wouldn’t feel silent.
Sampled a NL3 kalimba patch into the ESI just as an exercise. It wasn’t too bad, normalizing, trimming, looping, and recreating the amp envelope took maybe 15 minutes but that was because of fumbling around a bit. It really tries to make it as easy as possible despite having no graphical display. Normalizing was SO SLOW… waited a solid 10 seconds for it to finish working on a 0.5 second sample.
Update: Mutual SPP updates seemed to be working … and then started having feedback loops. Ableton is back to being clock master, no special MIDI routing.