Tap Tempo for the Master Clock?

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vegannoise
vegannoise's picture
Joined: August 11, 2012

Hi all,

I've looked around but haven't found any posts that mention this, so I hope I didn't miss them. 

In my setups I have been using one button on my Quneo to set the tap tempo for most of the effects that I use in any given rig, which works great. I give it a few taps and all my delays, tremolo, etc are in sync. 

The issue is, I have some plugins that only sync to the master clock in AM. They don't have a tap function that I can assign a MIDI button to, so I need to type the actual BPM into AM's master clock. Which is fine, unless I'm playing guitar and trying to sync the tempo to my band's live improvisation, which I do fairly frequently. 

So my question is, is there any way to set AM's master tempo by tapping? (Is it possible to assign a MIDI function to it that will do this, even in terms of an external plugin?  The best I've been able to do is assign a slider to it so I can scroll along different tempos, but this is obviously very innacurate and not optimal.) And if it isn't possible, have you considered adding this function in later versions? It would be incredibly useful.  

 

Thanks very much!

WinterHillMulch
WinterHillMulch's picture
Joined: June 23, 2009

This one's been on my hitlist for a while too!

If you're a Windows user you can play with this:

http://www.asseca.org/soma/taptempo.html

 

I also picked up one of these second hand for just such a purpose:

http://ploytec.com/34oneII/

 

I'm sure there are other options out there and I haven't looked for a while but these were the solutions I settled on when I last was dealing with this.

 

Of course it'd be cool if Ross could implement something natively.

Babaluma
Babaluma's picture
Joined: June 24, 2009

AnalogX Tap Tempo for PC, been using it over ten years:

http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/audio.htm

Install and set keyboard shortcut to Ctrl-Alt-T (Tap Tempo) and it's there whenever you need it!

vegannoise
vegannoise's picture
Joined: August 11, 2012

Hey guys,

Thanks a bunch for the responses! 

 

WinterHillMulch, thanks, I already had the Soma plugin,  but couldn't figure out how to get it to affect the master clock in Mulch. Have you figured out a way to get that to work?  And I've seen those little pedals before but haven't tried one yet. Something to consider... 

 

And Babaluma, thanks. I just downloaded that one, so I'll give it a shot and keep my fingers crossed!  

Still hope a future version of AM will have it built in... hint hint... 

Thanks again! 

WinterHillMulch
WinterHillMulch's picture
Joined: June 23, 2009

It's been a number of years since I've worked with Soma Tap tempo so I had to dig back through some backup drives to find the Mulch documents I was using back then.

As best as I can see, I was actually using a physical MIDI loop back to get the plugin signal to control the host. My patch had a MIDIIn contraption routing the signal from one of my controllers to the Soma plugin's Midi input patch node. Then I'd patched the MIDI output of the plugin to a MIDIOut contraption and must have been running a cable from the hardware MIDI output back to another input. I've always run RME interfaces so have generally had a second spare port to play with. 

Then it's just a case of ensuring that MIDI is enabled in Mulch and you've set Mulch to ChaseSync. I'm not entirely sure if I could have mapped the CC directly to the tempo parameter rather than chasing sync but I'd have to explore this further. To be completely honest with you I cannot remember which way I did it but I suspect I was most likely chasing sync. I'd have to rebuild my patch with my new rig and have a play around to confirm all of this.

Of course you don't have to use a hardware midi loop if you have some form of midi loopback software installed.

If I have a bit of spare time and put together a new patch I'll get back to you to confirm. 

I hope this helped in some way.

Andrew.

vegannoise
vegannoise's picture
Joined: August 11, 2012

Thanks, Andrew, 

I'll definitely keep playing around with it and see what I can come up with. I'll give your setup a try to see if I can make it work too. 

Thanks again!