How to Eliminate the Latency Retrigger Bug in MIDI Loops

Have an urge to learn, or a calling to teach? Want to share some useful Youtube videos? Do it here!
Post Reply
User avatar
Raveshaper
Posts: 1089
Joined: 16 Jan 2015

12 Feb 2015

Long title for the topic, but I just figured out this solution and wanted to share how it's done.

If you have a multichannel MIDI controller and want to use it to record things like fancy note repeats, rolls, and fills or if you simply want to have multiple EMIs running within the same template, you will encounter a bug that I call the "Latency Retrigger Bug". I'll describe this bug in the simplest terms I can manage using a hypothetical scenario.

Let's say you have an RPG-8 sending repeated notes at varying speeds into an EMI to broadcast gates and note CV to be used as rolls/fills/etc. Both the RPG-8 and EMI are in a combinator that receives notes from MIDI channel 1 in the MIDI Bus. A second combinator or uncombined instrument device receives notes from the MIDI channel that the EMI broadcasts to -- in this case MIDI channel 9 -- through its assignment in the MIDI Bus. In order to avoid the nasty infinite MIDI loop problem that requires a restart of Reason to fix, you must select the track in the sequencer that belongs to the second combinator or uncombined instrument device in this scenario. The Latency Retrigger Bug triggers the device on the selected sequencer track immediately when the controller fires a note event, then retriggers it once the physical loopback of the MIDI data has had a chance to complete its circuit according to the latency ms defined by the audio buffer size. I thought that hope was lost and no workaround could defeat this, but here's the simple solution.

Create another RPG-8 and assign it to receive notes on MIDI channel 9 in the MIDI Bus. Send the Gate and Note CV outs of this new RPG-8 into the combinator or uncombined instrument device whose notes you want to record. Select the track for the RPG-8 in the sequencer and play the controller to record the notes with no latency retriggering!

This was the one thing standing between me and being able to freely improvise using song sketches. This trick can also be used to play live by building up loops layer by layer. Hope this is useful to someone. :)
:reason: :ignition: :re: :refillpacker: Enhanced by DataBridge v5

Post Reply
  • Information
  • Who is online

    Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests