Infinitely held MIDI note without re-trigger?

Tom Auger · 2025-05-01T00:27:16+00:00

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For ambient tracks we often have long evolving instruments that need to be held a very long time (more than the Maschine pattern length limit) and without re-triggering.

How can this be accomplished? I was hoping that by dragging the note length beyond the pattern limit you would skip the note-off, but (at least with Straylight) I'm hearing the sample re-trigger at the start of every loop.

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LostInFoundation

How long do you need your compositions to be?

Maschine can have patterns of up to 256 bars.

One workaround (although I admit not perfect, since it will bring some other disadvantages) would be to set up the tempo of the song very low.

Let’s say you work on a composition that is at 120 BPM. If you instead set up the tempo at 1/4 of it (therefore 30 BPM), your composition will last 30m 08s before it starts looping back. Or if you set it up at 10 BPM, you can even have a 1h 42m 24s.

Do you need more time than this?

Of course as said this will have other disadvantages (practically unusable metronome, eventual audio can’t be so easily time stretched,…).

Another workaround (alas also not perfect) could be to sample those instruments (maybe with Maschine Auto Sampler) putting very high values and then setting up a long loop inside of it, so that when it starts looping the “evolving” will still be there.
Not so convinced about this last “solution” (even because it would require a looooooooong time sampling the instruments and a lot of space), so take this with a grain of salt.

Best solution imo would be to use Maschine as a plugin inside of a DAW (there are also free ones) that can have unlimited time for the compositions and load those instruments in tracks of the DAW instead of in Maschine. Practically using different tools for different tasks. Use Maschine and the DAW for what they are strong at, instead of working around their limitations

6xes

would putting the sample on its own group work?

then make the length of the pattern to some ridiculous length

whether the tail would continue after a new pattern triggers im not entirely sure on?

using a Clip would normally work if in arrangement mode(which you would be familiar with?)

patterns mode makes this little different

LostInFoundation

I think his problem is that “ridiculous length” is not enough.

As said, Maschine can have patterns of maximum 256 bars. As an example, a song with a pattern of 256 bars at 120 bpm lasts 8m 32s. It’s not so unusual for ambient tracks to be longer than 8m 32s… maybe with those “evolving instruments” playing from beginning to end (and he wants to avoid the patterns to loop and go back to start, which could cause the retriggering to be noticeable because of difference of sounds and/or pops, clicks and what else)

ozon

Not at my M+ right now, but… maybe you could

change the Time Signature and therefore the duration of a bar (from 4/4 to 4/1 would quadruple the bar duration).
change the Metronome to 4/8 or 4/16 to counteract tempo division by 4 (30 BPM instead of 120 BPM)

LostInFoundation

@Tom Auger While we are here, and since it seems you are into Ambient… you could be interested in this plugin (looks interesting for Ambient effecting) which is free now until 22

https://www.soundtoys.com/product/spaceblender/

And maybe of interest also for the others (well….anyone could be interested… it’s free ☺️)

Tom Auger

I suppose 8 minutes is plenty of time for most use cases - I don't think I'm willing to halve the BPM or anything like that. But I'm also contemplating the DAW approach - I've been considering adding Ableton Live + Push to things. I was disappointed that you can't really start/stop Maschine instances from Ableton - each Maschine instance is a monolithic and opaque object for the most part, so you are better off treating each instance (each "Track") as a separate "movement" and use Ableton to blend between movements. I still need to figure out how to actually disable playback in Maschine without stopping playback in Ableton, for memory/performance reasons.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

If anyone has alternate approaches that work directly in Maschine, I'm all ears!

ozon

What BPM are you using for yor ambient compositions? And what about the time signature suggestion?

Tom Auger

@ozon I'm at about 70-110 bpm depending on the composition. I am not sure I want to compromise with other aspects of the composition just to get a feature to "work".

6xes

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/226035#Comment_226035

if you are looking for an alternate method… take a good look at Reaper & Realearn

there are many idea's i have implemented that have Maschine in the midst of it all…

the simplest idea… was running 4 maschine instances with 2 maschine Jam

simple as it maybe… this is only scratching the surface

and the routing in Reaper is something special… and this is a big component when dealing with audio sources internally or externally!!

once you have your routing out of maschine sorted… the options really open up!!

i have used chat GPT to create me Reascripts for Reaper… which allows me to do things which are not builtin natively… and although they are simple scripts & simple audio functions… these are often the little barriers that get in the way of a performance workflow…

so as one envisages their performance workflow by utilising the controller you choose.. you will build your mappings accordingly.

best way to view Reaper… is as a audio Hub

D-One

@Tom Auger said:

still need to figure out how to actually disable playback in Maschine without stopping playback in Ableton, for memory/performance reasons.

You can simply deactivate the Maschine Plugin in Ableton, it disables the Playback (playhead stops moving inside Maschine-Plug along with everything else) it saves a fair bit of CPU usage, at least in the VST3 version, for VST2 i dont remmeber, but it will not save "memory" (RAM), at least not for what actually takes a lot of RAM (Kontakt Instruments).

D-One

For an infinitely held MIDI note this is how I would do it if i didn't require live playing:

Use Ableton to send it to Maschine — if you have a looped MIDI Clip in Ableton where the loop braces are after the start of the Note + 'preview' is ON + the note extends beyong the loop braces, after the Clip starts it will never stop for it's whole duration, so no Note-Off and no retrigger, unless you stop playback or the Clip ends (you can extend it infinitely).

This works for things like drones, ambient and everything that just requires a static note(s) but it's more of a programming approach rather than live playing, so has some disadvantages.

Of course, you have to tell the Ableton MIDI Track to send it's MIDI to Maschine-Plug, pick a Channel and also configure the Pad to receive MIDI from the Host on the same Channel.

Example project attached in case it helps anyone reading. (Im on AL12 Beta so it might not open on the latest public version, sorry)

HELD NOTE.zip

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