this is a great little hack!

Hey thanks! Lmk if you run into any fun challenges

Hey thanks! I've barely used the stock Ableton looper so it would be hard for me to compare. But I know that if you're automating in arrangement view, you're mostly confined to one specific arrangement. Looping with clips in session view gives you some flexibility in song structure, allowing for open-ended sections, and allows you to improvise with pre-programmed effects more easily.

Hey there! I don't know that I totally get what your dilemma is, but: if I'm understanding your question correctly, I don't think it's possible to start recording as a response to incoming MIDI data, unless you're explicitly sending a signal to start a loop. Whether you program it to start recording in advance with automation (with clips, etc.), or you press a button / tell it to start recording in real time, the looper is waiting for a signal to start listening - it's not just always listening, it needs to know the definite starting point (and ending point) in musical time. The way I have my tracks organized, where I'm never deleting any loops that I record in the process of playing the song, I end up with clips like stems that I can mix afterwards. Unless you're recording actively looping MIDI signals & player input MIDI signals into the same loop, I don't think you would end up with one giant clip containing all of the MIDI you recorded for a whole song. Hope this was trying to answer the right questions! Keep the music extremely simple if you're just trying to get the hang of BinkLooper, I wasted a lot of time trying to play the loops correctly when I was trying to figure out automation.

As far as I have figured out, you can't overdub MIDI onto an existing loop with BINKlooper. I don't know if I understand how everything is programmed in BINKlooper enough to explain why, but I know that you can't have a clip actively looping while you're recording a new clip in the same track at the same time. I've always split each element of my drums or orchestration into different tracks for organizational purposes, and it makes dummy clip automation a little simpler in my opinion. I'm working on a new video that explains my project file for the KAYTRANADA cover I did that might help explain my set up. Hopefully you don't have any limits to the number of tracks you can use since you already need a version of Live with Max compatibility to run BINKlooper. If you're really set on trying to overdub, you might check out other loopers like the loopers built into Live of ClyphXPro.

@@MasonLynass thank You so much for taking the time to adress my question 😎👊 i will definitely check out Your other vids and dive into it. I also think that it is not possibile to overdub midi in clips while using the bink looper.

Hey there! That's how mine works too, so I guess that's normal. I know from watching the video where BinkBeats talks about his looping set up, he mentioned that he stores all of his loops in scenes at the top of the project - who knows if he decided to do this because the Max device was programmed that way, or if he wanted the scenes to be there, so they built the Max device that way.

I don't think I ever found the way to program this with BINKlooper, but I think the issue is that once you start recording into a clip, time stops in the clip with BINKlooper automation, and so anything you have timed to occur after recording starts can't be automated in that clip. You could make another clip that contains automation to turn off the record button that you trigger after you've recorded, but that would temporarily stop the active looping clip. My workaround for this was to assign keys on my computer keyboard (or buttons on a MIDI device) to the track record button, so that I can toggle it on/off with one button press. I think in my Reich video I assigned all of the track record buttons on all of my tracks to the same computer key, so that I only had one button to disarm whatever track had just recorded. Lmk if you work something out, hope this helps!

@@MasonLynass Thanks for the quick reply. I figured there was a catch when I saw Binkbeats session on his Ableton interview showing some "disarm" labeled clips/scenes. Of course he uses a midi fighter to change scenes, but I am looking for a fully "hands off" programmed session (like Elise Trouw does). Her method (I believe...) with the IAC driver and Ableton looper can achieve this, but it lacks the midi sequencing/recording capability that can be quantized... this leads you to have to be VERY precise when playing your first note so it it is not either too early or too late, which can make all subsequent played loops "wonky"-sounding... she makes it look easy (but it is not- this is what Anomalie also talks about with his scripted Ableton sets). It is frustrating to not have a good complete "hands-off" solution that blends all the benefits of the BINKlooper, with the defunct ALK2, ClyphX Pro, and Ableton IAC driver/clip automation capabilities. The technologies are all there to achieve programmed looping "Nirvana", but no one has put it all together in the same package (yet). ClyphX Pro was very close, but now it's broken in Live 11! Please, some developer take over ALK2, work out the bugs, make the necessary improvements, and release it! I think lots of people in the "looping community" would invest on a fully hands-off scripted looping program that is reliable and working on M1 Macs and Live 11. End of rant ;)

@@jg648 Totally understand the need for a hands-free set up, I would love to press one button and be able to play through a whole song! My workaround seemed like the least amount of work to get the job done - BINKlooper can do 95% of the things I'd like to do and I didn't feel like learning a whole other method to figure out the other 5%. You could hypothetically program a foot pedal to do the same thing as my computer key, you'd be "hands free" as long as you keep a foot free!

hey Michel! sorry for the slow reply, hope you've figured something out by now! I ran into this frustrating problem and I think a lot of other people do too. I'm sure there are a bunch of different workarounds for this. My solution was to make an empty track and map a key on my computer keyboard to the record-arm of the empty track (you could map this to any controller, really). I have Live set to un-arm all of the other tracks when you arm a track (I think that's a default setting?), so when I press the key to arm the empty track, it un-arms all of the other tracks. One solution for your specific problem could be to define smaller ranges for your keyboard and bass instruments. If you're playing the same keyboard for both instruments, you could set a smaller range of input MIDI pitches for your instruments - like you could set the top half of your keyboard to be your keyboard sound, and the bottom half to your bass sound. Then you can use MIDI pitch device to make sure you're hearing notes in the correct octave. This wouldn't work if you're playing really low and really high notes at the same time in your keyboard part though.

Hey! I haven't run into this problem myself because I don't play this stuff live. I don't think there's a "right approach" but I can think of a couple possible solutions... I am pretty sure that Binkbeats makes unique tracks for each instrument of each song, instead of using the same track for multiple songs. Then he only has one or two "sample scenes" and programs the whole set in one project file... which seems crazy to me! I would think that takes a lot of computing power and would get difficult to keep track of where everything is. If I wanted to try this I would probably stick with stock plug-ins / devices as much as possible to keep my CPU down. To address the issue of tempo, I'm pretty sure that you can assign tempo to a scene outside your sample scenes - like you can not assign a tempo to the sample scene, and it will use whatever tempo is assigned through other scenes. If you assign tempo in the first scene of each song, whatever samples you have in your sample scenes will switch tempos whenever you start that first song scene. So as long as you are stopping between songs, you wouldn't run into any tempo issues. Just program something in the first song scene to delete the previous song's clips in the sample scene. I think. Haven't messed with this stuff in a bit! Hope this helps good luck!

If I understand your problem correctly, you can do this by making a clip with a longer length for your 2nd channel. You can set up a clip just like I set mine up around 4:10 for channel 1, then make a clip with a length of 2.0.0 and automate "arm" to start after 2 in the clip timeline instead of 1 for channel 2. When you start both of these clips at the same time, channel 1 will launch in the first measure, then channel 2 will launch in the second measure.

@@MasonLynass you are great, thank you

I figured out a work around! Never mind. Great video btw though man :)

@@jaywo4411 there are all sorts of workarounds, what did you come up with? I know that I sometimes automated the FX track so that the speaker turned off or the volume dropped to -inf when I wanted to record something and keep it from immediately looping. I also remember key/MIDI mapping a key on my keyboard (or button on a MIDI controller) to a record arm button of an empty track. The way my setup works, when I click to record arm a track, it turns the record arm off for any tracks that were already armed. So when I pressed my mapped key twice, it would only arm the empty track, then un-arm that track, so all of the record-arms on all tracks are reset to off. Sort of a roundabout hack, but whatever works!

@@MasonLynass Cheers for responding man, I was so baffled and frustrated by this yesterday I basically vomitted that question out to you! I'm using a similar method to your setup, but mapping the select & arm buttons to note values. I then place a long midi clip on a track seperate to anything else, playing the midi notes which I've mapped. That way it automitcally swithces when I need it to without touching anything. There's a few restrictions in that the Bink Looper needs a little bit of time to launch the next loop before it begins recording, which the track must be armed for to work, so you have to arm it a little ahead of time (meaning you can't record to the very end of a loop and instantly begin recording on an another track, you have to either let your oginal loop playback once to give you a chance to arm another track or have your loop not play to the end of the clip). Also bit random and unrelated but i'd love to know how you did the percussion for Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, Brown. It's beautifully spacious and theres some real nice glitchy repeats and stuff in there.

@@jaywo4411 whoa that's a cool way to rig it! I hadn't thought of making a clip that functions as a record arm press. I love that there are so many ways you can get to the same result. I think I went with automating the volume of the FX track to get around that other issue you talked about. I was thinking of making another video to talk about how I make generative stuff (including the percussion in GYORB). In the mean time, what I did for that was: - put a bunch of percussion sounds in a drum rack - add an Arpeggiator MIDI device to generate a constant rhythm (16th notes) on one MIDI pitch (one sound in the rack) - add a Random device to move the MIDI pitch around to play different sounds in the drum rack randomly You can have the Random device send MIDI pitches to places the drum rack that don't have a sample to create silence. I probably have a Beat Repeat on there to get the glitchy repeats. I have all kinds of techniques and tricks for generative things like that, but that's the basis of it!

@@MasonLynass Very nice man cheers, I hadn't thought to use blank spaces to create breaks in the pattern - great idea. A generative vid would definately be well recieved by me to say the least! Happy music making my dude

I haven't been using BINKlooper very much in 11 just because I'm working on projects where I don't need it... but. I did a test to see if I could re-create your issue. So I made a new project and put a BINKlooper into a MIDI track, and all of the scenes available to select were showing up as . I added some filler titles for all of my scenes and checked again and the scene selection was still showing a bunch of scenes. I remembered that when I was working on a project in Live 10, sometimes the scenes would show as until you save the project file and re-load the saved project. So when I saved my new project file and re-loaded it, all of my filler scene names showed up in the dropdown scene selection bar in the BINKlooper! Lmk if this is confusing hope it helps!

@@MasonLynass Thanks. I had a quick look at the underlying Max patcher code and it appears the live.observer object doesn't update the scenes properly. If I take the Max 'bang' out of the get_scenes function and add it to the presentation mode I can click on this and it will update the scenes without having to reload the project. Didn't see this issue with Live10 so maybe it's due to a change in the operation of the LiveAPI between versions 11 and 10.

@@davlar1575 wow nice catch! I never would have figured that out. Thanks for the update!

Unfortunately I don't think there are any precise solutions to your problem... Live needs some input to un-arm a track, and if you want it to be handled with automation (instead of something you do manually), the only place you can write automation for a track is with a clip inside the track (you can't automate track parameters with a clip in a separate track). So you'll need to have a clip launch, which will stop the recorded loop. There are more than a few work-around, creative solutions that I've used to handle this though. Depending on your set up and your specific use case, you might try: - automating the volume of the first FX track to -inf immediately after you're done recording the A loop - MIDI mapping the track record-arm button of an empty track to some button or key you can press, so that you can un-arm all actively armed tracks by arming the empty track by pressing the button - setting up a "monitor track" - you can make a group of loop & fx track pairs that share the same input (they could even be routed to the same output track with a MIDI instrument on it), and one monitor track at the end. all of the track pairs that contain loops have their volume automated off while you're recording loops, but the monitor track has its volume up and you hear whatever you're playing through the monitor track while you're recording. Then later, when everything is recorded, hopefully you can un-arm tracks if you want and automate the volumes of loop track pairs to hear those loops at the appropriate time. I've been working with a client recently and I've had to invent new ways of getting around this issue depending on the song and the part, but the possibilities seem sort of endless! Hopefully that's a decent consolation for not actually being able to give you the perfect solution.

​@@MasonLynass Hi Mason, the other workaround is to use the arrangement view. After some test I found this is the efficient way to have true scripted looping without touching any button. What I do is I use the binklooper to make "arm/unarmed track" automation. (It could be any other max device that allow to arm track actually) And I automate the regular Ableton looper to actually record loops. It works nice. You need to have as much looper than your different part, each looper can give you two different level with automation of the unde/redo. Exemple 4 tracks DRUMS / BASS / PIANO / GUITAR each have binkloopper and 2 regular loopper on them Lets say you do a simple arrangement : Piano part A 4bars ; drums A 8bars ; drums stop playing when you record the bass 4bars ; drums A back rec overdub for 8bars to have Drum B ; everything stop while you record Piano part B for 8bars ; then whole A section comes back while you guitar solo for 24bars , than B part for 8 bars and so on. You can do that without touching anything. It goes like this for the automation : piano arm track / looper 1 rec / 4bars / play - unarm, arm drums / looper 2 rec / 8bars / Stop - unarm ; arm bass / looper 3 rec / 4bars / play - unarm ; arm drum / play - overdub looper 2 / 8 bars / stop - undo - unarm ; arm piano / rec looper 4 / 8bars / looper 4 stop - unarm ; arm guitar - play looper 1, 2 and 3 for 24 bars ; drum looper redo - stop piano looper 1 - play piano looper 4 / 8bars. It's hard to explain with text so I hope in understandable haha Globally you have, arm/unarmed, looper control, and duration to set for each track. It's important to understand to use several looper on a same track to have different part, but if the song is only 4 chords looping no need to. We could also loop bass and keys together with a splitted keyboard, automate changing preset with a chain, fx automation and other stuff.

@@MasonLynass There is also this method but I didn't tried it. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/m92lrK-V3566l2g.htmlsi=tei5bunDXZNC0In4

@@MasonLynass the other workaround is that kzfaq.info/get/bejne/m92lrK-V3566l2g.htmlsi=tei5bunDXZNC0In4

@@monsterandmaster hey yeah that makes sense! I actually feel kind of silly for never thinking of using Arrangement View until this comment, so thanks for blowing my mind. I guess the one drawback I could see about using BINKlooper in Arrangement View is that you're stuck to one very specific timeline. If you want to have any amount of time to vamp, take an open solo, or just allow yourself some breathing room, you can do it with scenes, but you can't really do it in Arrangement View without a lot of clicking around the timeline. But for a lot of songs that I do I don't need any open time, so Arrangement View would probably work better!

can't say that I've ever tried to use BINKlooper with a project that large! might have to reach out to Bink himself about that one

Hey, so I did a quick test to try to recreate your setup. I made four tracks each with BinkLoopers, automated them how I described in the video, set GQ to 1 bar and set each looper's delay parameter one beat apart (to 5, 6, 7, and 8). I know from previous experience that GQ affects launching the first clip, which means that all of your arm/launch/delay etc. will start at the beginning of the bar, and I know that delay set to 1 starts recording at the beginning of the bar, essentially no delay. But I also noticed from running the test that GQ also affects the start of the actual recording. My track with delay set to 5 would flash the red recording light where the clip will record for 4 beats before beginning to record, the delay set to 6 would flash for 3, delay set to 7 would flash for 2, etc., but each clip would actually start recording audio at the same time because the GQ told each of them to start recording at the beginning of the next bar. I hadn't run into that problem yet because I guess I haven't programmed any performances where I need to start recording musical moments that begin in the middle of a bar. But I think you'll need to change your GQ in order to do what you want to do, if I understand you correctly. And that sucks because then there's probably a lot of stuff you've already programmed in your set that you'll have to redo!

@@MasonLynass Thanks for your reply man! I have talked with Connor Shefran (an amazing live looping artist), He says, its not possible to record single beat/half beat, using binklooper.. Would you agree to that?

@@ssaharoy7 I haven't really tried to do that enough to say definitely that it can't! It might be unconventional but you might try doubling/quadrupling your BPM so that a beat becomes a bar in a new tempo, if you want to spend the time to figure out how to program everything at like 400+ BPM haha

@@MasonLynass Thank you dude...Much appriciated.

I haven't really been making music like this recently, so I haven't been thinking about BinkLooper as much. Did you have any other questions about it? I'd be happy to help if I can!