Program changes and banks in Ableton

General discussion about Gig Performer
1

I am very happy with GP and its smooth operation with Ableton, and I’d like to make more songs that will listen to program changes from Ableton to switch the patches automatically. One thing I’m not getting though is the bank change… it’s not working for some reason…

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I send the midi out via Loopmidi (midi port software for windows, marked in green in the picture) and whenever the bank is on 0 (both in Ableton and in GP, marked blue and orange) the changes are smooth. When I change the bank number though there’s no response at all. Am I doing something wrong? Are the banks named or controlled differently in GP?

2

What does it look like in the GP MIDI Monitor when you use a different bank in Ableton?

3

That was a great idea! when I changed the banks it didn’t show any changes, but when I switched the Sub-banks in ableton- that when it works! Just noticed that if I defined the song in GP to be signed under “Bank #1”, the equivalent in Ableton’s Sub-bank is the GP bank number + 1 (so #2 in this case)

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Also checked for higher bank # and it was verified.

2 Likes
4

There is no CC0 displayed there. That’s the MSB number. Banks are composed of a CC0 or MSB (most significant byte or coarse) message, an LSB (least significant byte or fine) message and finally the actual program changer number.

If you send CC0 with a value of 0, CC32 with a value of 1 and a Program change with a value of 0 you will have selected Bank1 and switched to the first PC in that bank.

Note that bank switching is stateful which means that once you switch to a certain bank all subsequent PC messages are related to that bank until a new set of CC0/32 messages arrive.

5

Ableton uses 1 based numbers for banks so bank 1 in live is actually sending the value of 0 and PC of 1 is sending out a zero as well.

So if you want to send “Bank 1, Program Change 0” to GP from live you have to set things like this
Screen Shot 2020-10-01 at 7.48.38 AM

Which basically means MSB=0, LSB=1 and PC=0

Hope this helps.

4 Likes
6

Amazing! Thank you! works like a charm

7

Each instance has its own settings. Go into Preferences > Global Midi Settings and check the settings towards the bottom that specify how PC messages are received and from which ports.