Set Song Tempo via Combinator control

[aMUSiC]

While semantically this does not belong in the Combinator, I would like a feature where the transport control (and most importantly the tempo) can be targetable and controllable through a combinator button. For instance, I could bind a combi button to set the song tempo to a particular BPM.

This would be useful for live gigs, where songs are loaded as combinator patches, but each song has a particular BPM (if the song has pattern sequencers or sounds that are bound to the song tempo), so I could simply set the tempo through the touch of a button on my midi controller, instead of having to manually enter it mid-gig on the laptop screen.

[selig]

I would do this with tempo automation in the timeline. If already using Combinator for songs, you can switch songs by advancing the active track button (I would do this with my MIDI controller). To add tempo to this, when you move from the first song to the second song, you would advance to the next track in the sequencer AND use the FF button on the transport to move to bar 2 in the timeline. So song 2 in the set uses track 2 for the combinator, and bar two for the tempo. this approach would also allow you to automate just about anything else as well, such as changing the volume of a patch for a song or a filter setting or FX (so you can share FX devices across all tracks). Lots of power there - and you can use Blocks to indicate song title and give a visual indication of which instruments are being used by linking block and Combinator track color to each song.
And you don’t HAVE to do this on every bar, I choose that length because one button can advance you to the next bar reliably, which is important for live gigs. You could also have many bars included in each Block/Song (using blocks only as markers here, to be clear), and then use the FF to advance bars to get automation changes of FX for different sections of the song. For example you could have a big reverb for the breakdown only, or a delay that rings out at the end of a section or whatever you like since many things can be automated.

[dioxide]

One way of doing this might be by setting Tempo Automation in Blocks. Then you can either move the tempo automation Blocks over the top of each Song in your main timeline, or stay in Blocks mode and switch between each Block depending on which Song you are playing. I've done live performances where every Song is pasted into a separate Block, mostly to make it easier to adjust track order and make sure nothing gets left behind when I'm moving things around the timeline.

So yes it's a workaround but at least it's a way of making it work now rather than waiting for it to be added.

[aMUSiC]

The blocks in the transport and accessing them through FF is a good idea that I hadn’t thought of. However this only works if the track list and order in a gig is set in stone, which in my case and experience almost never happens. Depending on the crowd my band often skips tracks or jumps back and forth, which besides putting me in a pickle to have to interact with my laptop so I can search for the song to load in the combi would also need me to skip the playhead to the correct block.

Maybe I’ll get my hands dirty with RE development and create a simple tempo changer RE that exposes its target to the combinator editor, provided of course that there is an api to access the song tempo programmatically.

[jam-s]

Maybe I’ll get my hands dirty with RE development and create a simple tempo changer RE that exposes its target to the combinator editor, provided of course that there is an api to access the song tempo programmatically.

In don't think there is an API in the RE SDK to set the tempo from an RE, but it might be possible to use a custom remote codec or script or by using Ableton link and the MIDI Out device together with a little tool which would receive the MIDI and translate it to a tempo change.