I’ve looked around and found a few possibilities but none say they’ll do exactly waht I need. except one, which is made for Ableton Live apparently, not Cantabile. I’ve use Piz Midi chords to create a harmony line for my EWI Akai 4000S (monophonic wind controller), and it sort of works but it’s limited because it merely maps notes, so it can’t play it’s own independent harmony line. (And it’s a little clunky.) For example, D harmonized with A means D will always play a harmony of A, but if the 2nd time you play a D you need an F#, you’ll still get an A.
So I thought a sequencer should work better, especially if I can program up to 32 notes or more, and I can trigger each step with any Note On message. That’s where I’m having trouble finding one, it needs to advance/play just 1 step with each note on, regardless of what trigger note is played. I guess I could use Cantabile to remap all notes to 1 note, if necessary.
Thanks in advance for the ideas!
Tom
I knocked a rack together that uses CC Stepper from CodeFN42 and bindings that I think satisfies your description. I made it to do 16, 32 or 64 steps but it can be configured for any number of notes up to 128 if you want that. Let me know if you are interested.
I came up with a linked rack combined with a VSTi from CodeFN42 called CC Stepper and rack bindings. The behavior is that when you play a monophonic MIDI note into the rack it plays a specified note out held until the rack receives the next note in which silences the previous held note and plays the new one. When it reaches the last note it loops back to the first note in the sequence. Each states bindings are matched to the preset I have set up in the CC Stepper VSTi so it warrants study. You can make any length up to 128 steps for your custom rack states you might want to set up. One last note is that for CC Stepper to work the transport must be running like any other sequencer even though it is configured to react to note triggers instead of clock syncing with the system. The CC20 output from the ramped sequence values are what drive the bindings where you place your notes.
There are 3 presets I included to get you going. One is a 16 step, another is a 32 step and the last was a 64 step.
The top bindings are to turn on the transport on the first note in for the stepper and there is one to stop the transport which is bound to the first custom button on the rack. Stopping the transport resets the Sequence.
Here is the rack. I only loaded a scale to test it and the rest of the notes have not been programmed yet. Just save each sequence you set up as a rack state to recall later. Feel free to modify away as needed!!
That’s fantastic Dave, thanks! I’ll have to dig into it but do you think I could change or insert a binding that silences a note when receiving a Note Off message? Or did you try that and it wasn’t functional? I think most of the harmony lines I want to play are relatively fast so the way it’s currently programmed should work for most parts, just wondering what I’ll do if I have a part that requires a rest or a long pause.
Regardless that’s a very minor point, this looks great… Thanks!
Tom
Not a problem, I found an alternate way using the rack without the CCstepper, so no transport required. I will post it below too. It uses loopback ports and comma separated numbers to program the number of steps. It also loops back on the last step. The first custom button on the rack resets the sequence of numbers back to the beginning.
I made one more improvement I hope and that was to replace the binding target for the Note Off to CC 123 which is MIDI “All Notes Off” instead of Cantabile’s Engine command “All Sounds Off”. I wanted to only send the all notes off to the synth used for harmonies and not all the synths in the song that might be playing other parts. I’d highly advise you all do the same to avoid issues.
I’ve had success with a custom script I found on the Reaper forums for Round Robin notes for the ReaJS plugin. It has a triggerable reset as well if you need to start your sequence over before getting to the end or if you get out of sync.
WOK had a step sequencer that worked on note input as well. Not at home now but if there is interest I can look up more specifics.
Dave, I got this rack loaded and modified to play a song or two. Quite nice and easy to program. Do you think there is a way to make the sequence advance with a note on, note off, etc. to play some faster sequences? In other words, play the first note with a NOTE ON, play the second sequence note when the first note it released (NOTE OFF), play the third sequence note when another NOTE ON is received. I use foot/bass pedals and could advance with each foot down, foot up.
I modified it to do what you asked, it triggers a note on (held) with a note on input and the next note on (held) with a note off input. I added a few features. I thought since you were using a foot pedal you might want a way to end the sequence in silence before it looped back to the first note. To do this I made it so you can optionally enter 123, 123 at the end of the sequence of numbers it will send an all notes off message to the VST to are routed to. The reason for 2 123s is because if you have a pedal up that is a held note that is the last note of your sequence pressing down the pedal would send the first 123 killing the note ons but releasing the pedal would advance the sequence to loop to back the beginning and sound the first note again (that was a mouthful!). So using 2 123s covers both scenarios and would still leave it with all notes off. I also added an external reset switch (it wants to see a CC#60 momentary) that silences the notes and returns the loop to the first step and the first custom button on the rack does the same thing.
Works Great! Thanks! Using “Note to Controller Filter” can send CC60 to reset if the lowest bass pedal note is pressed (or any note); nice touch. With the on/off, some pretty fast sequences can be played.
