Similar situation with Ableton's Operator synth: From some approximations I made the modulator amplitude is actually in the range of about 6000 when I play a 440 Hz sine wave on my keyboard. However, when I set the FM level of operator E to 100 as shown here, I can hear and see that this doesn't mean that operator E then has an amplitude of 100 and consequently modulates the frequency of operator F by 100 Hz. My question is, what does this level parameter actually mean in terms of modulator amplitude, behind the scenes? From my understanding, the modulator amplitude controls the variation in frequency of the carrier signal. In this case, operator E modulates operator F "fully", so on the scale of 0 to 100 provided by FM8, the FM modulation level/amount is set to 100. Likewise, any other tracks that are routing MIDI into this track should be checked too, since the pitchbend messages can be coming from anywhere.I am currently working on FM synthesis and while I do understand the roles of carrier frequency, modulator frequency and modulator amplitude, I've been having problems with understanding how lots of software (I suppose also hardware) synthesizers handle these parameters.įor example, here is a basic FM setup in NI FM8: The place to check would be the clip envelopes of whatever clip is playing right at this jump - not track automation.
Just playing a clip without pitchbend offset is not enough you have to explicitly transmit the "pitchbend is 0" message before the devices in the chain know to move it back to center.Īn example is that my FM8 bass patch will play incorrectly at an octave lower for 8 bars and then suddenly jump up an octave correctly (keep in mind, I've checked and there is no automation at all happening at this jump) If you stop playback in the middle of this, or jump it to a new location on the timeline, the synths in the track have the pitchbend stuck at whatever the last message was. If you're in Arrangement view and you've got some clips with pitchbend envelopes, then Live is firehosing new pitchbend messages into those tracks as the playhead moves over those clips, so long as it's constantly changing (such as a slope).
MIDI pitchbend is a series of update messages, not a single authoritative line like automation is.
I'm not sure if this is your problem or not, but I've run into a kind of similar situation using pitchbend data. Tl dr: FM8 and Massive keep fucking with my octaves - WHY?! I've reset ableton, reset my comp, etc - and I'm still having this problem.
I didn't start noticing this problem much until I did a bit of automation with Ableton's pitch envelope, which makes me think it's related to that, as sometimes I can "reset" the midi and get it back to the correct octave, though I'm still not entirely sure how to consistently do that "reset" other than fucking around.Īn example is that my FM8 bass patch will play incorrectly at an octave lower for 8 bars and then suddenly jump up an octave correctly (keep in mind, I've checked and there is no automation at all happening at this jump), when I reset the song to the beginning of those 8 bars the FM8 bass is now playing correctly the whole time once the jump forced it to the correct octave. So I'm having this problem with midi in both FM8 and Massive right now where they randomly drop an octave. If you are looking for feedback on your own music please post it to /r/abletonfeedback/.
However, please take notice of a few rules:ĭiscussion of cracked software will be removed. Questions about synthesis, getting a certain sound with Live, troubleshooting, general or specific production questions and the like are welcome. Please post anything related to Live compatible hardware and software, synths, VSTs, controllers, etc.