Why are Advanced Lock States a thing? Why not allow morph between Scenes?

Tom Auger

I learned about Advanced Lock States and it blew my mind. The ability to set up a bunch of sequences and instruments playing one way and then switch to another completely different state at the press of a single button is…. well hold on, that's kind of what Scenes already do…. except for the morphing part. And with Scenes you get to put them in an arrangement, and they are arguably easier to visualize as well.

So this is one of those dumb questions I have that probably only an NI engineer or product manager can answer, but I'm thinking maybe there are some folk here that are knowledgeable enough about the differences between Scenes and Lock States that they can hazard a guess…

Why did NI decide to create a completely different system of Advanced Lock States that essentially does the same thing as Scenes, but with the ability to morph? Why not just add that ability to Scenes themselves, and thus simplify the workflow a little?

For those of you that are experienced users, can you imagine a scenario where the Lock State functionality was instead incorporated into Scenes? If not - why not?

Can you imagine that instead of creating Lock States, NI had elected to "upgrade" Scenes to be able to:

• optionally store the entire state of the system (at event 1.1.1 of the Scene)
• morph between scenes instead of hard-cutting

Do you see any fundamental reasons which this would simply not work that justified creating Advanced Lock States?

Thanks in advance!

—PS: I know this question is completely hypothetical and may sound like I'm inviting complete conjecture (I am, kinda), but getting a good answer will help me better understand the thinking behind the software. For a 10+ year user of Ableton, I sometimes have a hard time breaking old paradigms and thinking "the Maschine way". Thanks for your patience and generosity!

D-One

You're looking at Scenes and Locks as the same thing, it's definitely not, morphing is not the only thing that sets them apart even tho they can be used to achieve the same result… Each has its own set of pros cons.

I look at Lock-states as "auto" modulation; that's probably actually what's happening under the hood: parameters change from X values to Y, done via a quick and easy way while hiding all the fuss, such as a ton of modulation (what people usually call 'automation') lanes… Hiding all that fuss can be both good or bad in terms of arranging a song, especially if you need to change one of the hundreds of parameters that were morphed.

A Scene/Section can be much, much more than just parameter value changes, it's a different sequence, different Patterns, MIDI notes…

How would you morph from having MIDI notes or Pattern to then not having it in the next Scene? Fade to silence? You would need to correlate the lack of something (MIDI Data in this case) to what, volume fader movement? Even if fading everything was acceptable it would have to be per Pad/Sound because surely you would want some things to change abruptly, imagine the work it would require selecting each one… I might want to morph Pad 1 of Group Z but not Pad 15 of Group Y.

It's hard to visually normal Section changes bundled with morphing, not even DAW's do this AFAIK, and keep in mind we can't even fine control the morph time/length.

To me it makes sense that Scenes/Sections and Lock's are completely separate, it gives us freedom to stack different approaches together, what is really missing is a way to record/sequence Lock changes without the use of awkward workarounds such as MIDI loopback.

D-One

You're looking at Scenes and Locks as the same thing, it's definitely not, morphing is not the only thing that sets them apart even tho they can be used to achieve the same result… Each has its own set of pros cons.

I look at Lock-states as "auto" modulation; that's probably actually what's happening under the hood: parameters change from X values to Y, done via a quick and easy way while hiding all the fuss, such as a ton of modulation (what people usually call 'automation') lanes… Hiding all that fuss can be both good or bad in terms of arranging a song, especially if you need to change one of the hundreds of parameters that were morphed.

A Scene/Section can be much, much more than just parameter value changes, it's a different sequence, different Patterns, MIDI notes…

How would you morph from having MIDI notes or Pattern to then not having it in the next Scene? Fade to silence? You would need to correlate the lack of something (MIDI Data in this case) to what, volume fader movement? Even if fading everything was acceptable it would have to be per Pad/Sound because surely you would want some things to change abruptly, imagine the work it would require selecting each one… I might want to morph Pad 1 of Group Z but not Pad 15 of Group Y.

It's hard to visually normal Section changes bundled with morphing, not even DAW's do this AFAIK, and keep in mind we can't even fine control the morph time/length.

To me it makes sense that Scenes/Sections and Lock's are completely separate, it gives us freedom to stack different approaches together, what is really missing is a way to record/sequence Lock changes without the use of awkward workarounds such as MIDI loopback.

Tom Auger

@D-One brilliant - thanks for that. Of course, I wasn't even thinking of the MIDI notes in sequences etc. I found your answer really helpful to keep things straight for me. Thanks for taking the time!