I’m not sure whether I should post this under Tips and Tricks, New Features or here because this post involves all 3.
I have the BB working as a master midi sync with the Voicelive 3 looper. A recent post in this section by the3nuges explains how to do that. It works really well as far as syncing goes as long as you sync your loops to the BB (BB as master).
I also have the Soundbrenner Pulse vibrating metronome which I have managed to link to the BB by linking the Soundbrenner Pulse app on my iPad to various 3rd party apps that allow a connection between Ableton Link (as used by the Soundbrenner App) and midi. (those apps are “Link to Midi” and “Midi Link Sync” if anyone is interested.
My idea is a little ambitious: I thought it would be great to be able to record a loop on the Voicelive 3 using the Pulse as a guide (all devices being synced together) and then bring in the drums at a later stage and have the drums sync precisely with the loop. This would make for a great live effect I think. Anyway I had some success with this in 2 different configs: 1) BB as salve. Pulse send midi to BB which sends midi to the VL3 via the midi thru setting, This enabled me to set the BPM on the BB using the Pulse. Pretty neat idea: not click track, metronome sound or flashing light. 2) BB as master. Send the midi clock from the BB to both the VL3 and the Pulse (via various apps mentioned earlier) giving me the default BPM via the Pulse before the drums are played. Same idea as 1: I can record a loop before the drums kick in.
Even though I had success with the above it wasn’t reliable enough. What I found is that the BB works well as the master, keeping downstream devices in sync. But the Midi to Ableton Link app (“Midi Link Sync”) is not able to sync the midi clock from the BB for some reason and can only sync the tempo (possibly because it expects it to sync to the bar and not just the beat - only guessing here). A more interesting issue I found is that when the BB is the slave and the midi is passed thru to the VL3 (which has a metronome) I noticed the BB lags behind the beat. And the lag is big enough to notice when you play the BB and the VL3 metronome together. So it seems that the BB drum beat sound is slightly behind the midi clock beat coming in. This makes sense to me because the BB is producing sound from wav files and I am guessing the process to make those sounds takes a few milliseconds thus making it drop very slightly behind the midi clock. Perhaps that is not the reason…
In any case one suggestion I have for improvement therefore is to provide an option in the BB setup menu to add an adjustable delay between the midi in and the MIDI Thru output on the BB. This would help to bring the drum ‘sound’ in sync with the midi clock going through the midi out port (when set to Thru) and would allow downstream devices to use the same adjusted midi clock as a guide and therefore be more accurately in sync with the BB.
Any thoughts on this?
(Apologies for the long post)