One of the ways I am hoping to use square is as something of a midi live looper …
My theory was that , I could begin playing a piano part …and keep the loop open until a time where I felt the phrase has ended (this bit works)… then close the loop and have that initial loop create a base tempo for the rest of the piece (this is the bit that doesn’t)…
At the moment, what I get is the bpm seem to stay at the preset 120bpm and my loop kind of show us as a non quantised division of this …suh as 7.1 bars…
So the issue is that if I was to , for example bring in a drum machine …it would just play at 120 , not at a sub division of the first loop…
There are so many options in this machine that I am not sure if I am just missing something or if it can’t be done.
I don’t use the live looper feature so I hope that someone who does and would know better than me may chip in on this. But as there doesn’t seem to be as many Pyramid users active on the forum these days I thought I’d comment, if only to keep the topic open a little longer. You may find some better answers by searching the Pyramid topics on the forum.
I suspect Pyramid needs to ‘know’ the BPM and time signature before you record the loop. I don’t think you can get it to…
I think the MIDI notes and events will always be placed on the nearest 96ppqn point to where they occured based on the current tempo and the active track’s time signature. And it is probably best to use some sort of click track (or the metronome) to play along to.
I think (if you didn’t want to have a metronome/click track running, perhaps setting it up would inhibit your flow) what I would probably try to do is to use the tap tempo (BPM pad) at some point just before recording (this could be during, if you could free up a hand, or in between rehearsing the part possibly).
What I don’t think you can do is have different BPMs for different tracks/patterns within a project (at a given time), it’s a global setting and any changes to BPM will affect all tracks/patterns despite Pyramid being able to handle multiple time signatures at a time.
If, say, you did write the beginings of a number one hit (or something more worthwhile keeping) with the live looper and what you played didn’t fit the BPM you may ever so slightly, possibly, maybe, be able to get it looping to some BPM by using a ‘wrong’ time signature. But it would leave you with a pretty tricky pattern to work with. Alternatively, it might be worth painstakingly moving notes/events along (in Step mode) to fit the ‘proper’ length of bars and tempo. It might take some time and you might feel you’d lose some of the feel of your performance but it might possibly be worth the bother if what you played was good and unlikely to be repeatable. I’m quite happy doing stuff like that, but I work slowly and I’m not a keyboard player. That may not be a feasible option for you.
Another harebrained suggestion to ‘correct’ a loop would be to use the delay FX. If say you wanted to ‘timestretch’ the MIDI notes/events (i.e. make your 7.1 bars span 8 bars) you could potentially add a slowly expanding delay across the pattern.An automation (or maybe an LFO) that resembled a sawtooth (rising ramp) might work to increasingly spread the MIDI notes/events out. It would probably take some tweaking (of the ‘amplitude’), but if you got it working well enough you could then consolidate the pattern and perhaps only have to make a few additional alterations.
Thank you for your detailed response…I am going to give some of these things a try…I think I have been spoilt by my simple future artists midi looper which has this as a baked in feature ( BPM calculated by the first loop point ) …but as with all things it is, itself missing other features… There may be a convoluted way to use both at the same time to offer both options…but that is too much to think about this early !
I think that Future Artists MIDI Looper assumes a 4/4 time signature when ‘working out’ the loops BPM. It’s a pretty clever little thing, though.
I think you probably could use both that and the Pyramid to give you that sort of functionality. It may require using the FAML to record the first loop, have it sending MIDI clock to Pyramid, then, if required, recording the MIDI from the FAML to Pyramid (I don’t think you’d want to record on Pyramid until after the FAML had decided on the BPM). I’m not sure if you’d be wanting some MIDI merge box with that sort of a setup (it is a bit early). It would take some thought and getting the right settings on Pyramid but I think you should possibly be able to get something going with the two.