I just went down a UASMO / Ableton Live 10 sync rabbit hole and thought to share my experience for anyone who experiences something similar in the future.
When using Pyramid to start / stop → Machinedrum (MIDI OUT A) and a few other synths (Matriarch, Subharmonicon, Prophet 08 (MIDI OUT B), everything plays nice and starts / stops in time, all at the same PPQ. Nice and neat, no issues. Stops fine, starts fine, plays fine, stays synced, great.
When introducing the UASMO from Ableton to the MIDI IN on the Pyramid, things get weird. If I press play in Ableton, the Pyramid plays fine, sometimes stutters, but it starts everything off in time together. All of the machines play in sync together, but they are not following the BPM set from Ableton Live. The stated BPM on the Pyramid varies wildly but the timing itself doesn’t actually change. The Machinedrum plays at twice the speed as it does if I bypass the UASMO and launch the sequence from the Pyramid. The MIDI IN on the Pyramid also has a MIDI Solutions Quadra Merge in line in order to receive the inputs from the synths themselves.
Removing the QuadraMerge has no affect on the behavior.
When fiddling with preferences in Ableton Live, I decided to turn off both Remote and Sync within the MIDI tab and that seems to have solved my issue. I’m not using any turbosync settings in the Pyramid for the Machinedrum, nor am I using turbo on the Machinedrum itself.
In Pyramid’s MIDI OUT settings I am using MIDI A + MIDI B OUT, not OUT / THRU.
I wonder if I was somehow doubling the receipt of the clock in the pyramid through some loopback mishap. I disabled the MIDI CLOCK OUT on the Matriarch DIN port to ensure I wasn’t double clocking somehow from there, too. I seem to get a strange dump of MIDI data into the subharmonicon upon stopping the sequence which causes it to play the current sequence back once or twice at double speed, but that is fine for now.
Oddly enough, everything seems to be playing nicely now, except for one last quirk: Ableton plays 1 measure before launching the Pyramid. Haven’t figured that out yet. That’s a small price to pay for a sync’d setup, so I’ll deal with it for now and edit if I figure out what the issue is. Same behavior with a pre-roll on for recording, too.
I then applied a value of 5 to the offset to achieve a perfectly synced to the grid recording in Ableton. Achieving this via USB midi was always elusive, constantly having to adjust MIDI Delay Compensation settings in order to get things lined up properly. Now I can just play, record, and arrange to my heart’s content.
