Weird BPM issue

Aeros Loop Studio Help, Questions and Bugs
1

I’ve got a MIDI chain that runs as follows: Hotone Ampero Control (with a Roland EV-5 expression pedal connected to it) → BeatBuddy (channel 1) → Aeros Loop Studio (channel 1) → Hologram Chroma Console (channel 2) → Hologram Microcosm (channel 3)

The Amerpo/Roland are set up so that if I move the expression pedal, it sends higher or lower values for a certain CC on one of the Hologram pedals’ respective channels. This works as expected, so the messages are being passed through the BeatBuddy and Loop Studio. However, whenever I press down or up on the expression pedal, the Loop Studio also acts as if its BPM is being changed, as follows:

  • If the BPM hasn’t been set in a recorded loop yet and the Loop Studio is in the loop setup screen, the BPM will dip down 1-5 beats for a few moments and then go back up to the BPM that has been set by the BeatBuddy.

  • If the BPM has been set and I go back to the loop setup screen and press the expression pedal, the BPM will turn red for a few moments, indicating the BPM is trying to be changed but cannot be changed (since it’s already set).

  • If the loop is playing and the BPM has already been set, the loop studio loop will start getting slightly delayed, and some weird clipping or gaps start to happen between the beginning and end of the loop.

At no time during any of the above does the BPM value shown on the BeatBuddy change. The Hotone/Roland are sending the messages to a channel that the Loop Station isn’t even supposed to be listening to, for CCs that I don’t think are even relevant to BPM at all (e.g., CC 9 — although the CC doesn’t seem to matter — I’ve tried various ones). I also tried filtering out CC messages on the Loop Station entirely, and this doesn’t do anything either.

Any ideas what could be going on or what a possible fix could be?

2

Having thought about this and researched it a bit more, I’m guessing that when I press the expression pedal, a flood of messages gets released: e.g., let say it’s currently on value 20 of 0-127 on whatever CC/channel it’s assigned to send messages on. I press down, and the value goes up to, say, 80 in a series of many incremental changes over a short span of time. This, in turn, momentarily clogs up the overall midi pipeline and causes slight delays in the arrival of the clock packets, which leads to fluctuations in the BPM.

If I’m right, I still have no idea what I can do about that, but at least I know what the problem is… :joy:

3

Hey there,

This second note is likely it, unfortunately, I can’t say there is much to do if the system is flooded with MIDI, potentially by incorporating some sort of active MIDI splitter instead of a linear MIDI chain, there is potential that the drift is also due to the natural delay introduced by each device in the chain

Thanks for reporting, let us know if you find a good solution that works for you!

4

Thank you for the reply and suggestion! For the time being, I’m just going to change the order of the MIDI chain so it goes BeatBuddy → Loop Studio → Ampero → Hologram pedals. The downside of this, of course, is that the Ampero can only send MIDI messages to the Hologram pedals now, but it’s already handling so much with them that I guess it would maybe be more practical to have another MIDI controller for the BeatBuddy and Loop Studio anyway, as I’m already having to do a lot of tap dancing to change banks/functions on the Ampero with just the Hologram pedals.

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5

My pleasure, hope you can find out what works best let us know!

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