Reliable way to do sound on sound midi live loop recording?

[A Tolerable Quietude]

I'm wondering if there's a way to enable sound-on-sound loop recording on a midi track, which will play back what I've recorded so far as I'm playing?  Like what people do when they are live looping, building up the sound as they go, without stopping and restarting each time?

From the documentation, it looks like the answer should be NO.  This says:  "Note: When loop recording in Sound on Sound mode, you will not be able to hear the prior loop passes until you stop recording. This is because takes are only committed after recording is stopped."

So why am I even asking?   Because, despite what the documentation says, sometimes it actually does work.  With a brand new project, if I drop in an instrument track, set loop points and turn on looping, then start sound-on-sound recording, Cakewalk will play back prior loop passes, without having to stop and restart.  But try it again on another track, it might or might not work.

[David Baay]

Replacing my previous post in its entirety as I just realized I got this backwards. The note you referenced applies to Audio recording only. Realtime loop recording of MIDI in Sound on Sound mode should consistently be letting you hear previous takes played back as desired. It actually requires a workaround to avoid (two MIDI tracks, one to echo input, and the other to record without echoing). 

Edited October 14, 2022 by David Baay

[A Tolerable Quietude]

David, thanks for the reply!

If it should work consistently, then I'll dig in and try to figure out why it isn't for me.  In my experience this works reliably with an empty track and an empty project.  But in other cases (already a midi clip on the track, other tracks in the project) I've experienced:

• It works.  Cakewalk plays prior loop passes while recording.
• It kinda works.  Cakewalk plays prior loop passes, but the midi notes double up on the second pass through, triple up on the third pass through, etc.  (Earlier passes get louder and flammed.  When I stop though, it goes back to single notes.)
• It simply doesn't work.  I can record multiple takes on a single track in loop, sound-on-sound record, but I don't hear the prior takes until I stop and restart the recording.

As far as I know, I'm not doing anything exotic with the tracks.  The one I'm recording on is doing "Input Echo = Auto Thru", all other tracks not involved in the recording are on "Input Echo = off".

If anyone knows of a tutorial, youtube video, etc, on how to do this reliably, I'd love to see it!

[David Baay]

1 hour ago, Eric S. said:

It kinda works.  Cakewalk plays prior loop passes, but the midi notes double up on the second pass through, triple up on the third pass through, etc.  (Earlier passes get louder and flammed.  When I stop though, it goes back to single notes.)

This is likely due to the track Input being set to Omni rather than the speciifc port and channel of your keybooard and echoing  MIDI coming from a soft synth that's echoing to a vitual MIDI Out or via some hardware loopback path.

Record mode is a per-project setting so if some projects work and some don't, you should double-check that it's Sound on Sound.

[A Tolerable Quietude]

2 hours ago, David Baay said:

This is likely due to the track Input being set to Omni rather than the speciifc port and channel of your keybooard and echoing  MIDI coming from a soft synth that's echoing to a vitual MIDI Out or via some hardware loopback path.

Record mode is a per-project setting so if some projects work and some don't, you should double-check that it's Sound on Sound.

Good guess, but it's not that.  I learned not to set track input to Omni the hard way early on, so I don't use that ever.  I always set to a specific external input and channel.  I do use drum maps however, so a common routing I use for drums is:

Physical keyboard--> Midi track (sound-on-sound loop recording enabled, input echo = auto thru) --> Drum Map --> soft synth --> Audio track (record not enabled, input only coming from the audio send of the soft synth)

Maybe something about using the drum map is causing this?  (Edit:  Probably not.  I just tested the same project, but I removed the drum map from the routing and went right from the midi track to the soft synth, and it still doubled and redoubled on each pass through.)

When it happens, all the doubled/tripled/etc notes go away when I stop recording.  On playback, it sounds as expected, and there are no extra notes in the track's event view.

Edited October 14, 2022 by Eric S.
Adding information

[David Baay]

Sounds distinctly buggy, especially "all the doubled/tripled/etc notes go away when I stop recording", but I've never seen or heard of anything quite like it so can't imagine what the trigger might be. I gather you don't have a project that does it consistently?

 

[msmcleod]

I'm certainly not getting that here, certainly not with MIDI tracks routed to an instrument track.

All I'm doing:

1. Insert Addictive Drums 2 as an instrument track
2. Arm the track
3. Set recording mode to Sound on Sound, with the following options:



4. Create my loop points, and hit R.

I built up a track starting with kick drum, then hi-hat, then snare. All of my previous takes are heard, and I'm not hearing any doubling up of notes.

I think @David Baay probably hit the nail on the head:   Disable MIDI out on your plugin and/or don't use Omni as an input.  

In my case Omni was on, but no plugin had MIDI out enabled.

If MIDI out was enabled on an instrument, setting the MIDI input to only listen on your MIDI controller/keyboard would stop it from receiving anything other than what you're playing and the previous takes.

FWIW, I don't think that having MIDI out in itself is necessarily a problem in itself, but many VSTi's repeat what they've received through their MIDI output - and this is the issue if you've got your track input set to Omni.
 

[A Tolerable Quietude]

8 hours ago, msmcleod said:

I think @David Baay probably hit the nail on the head:   Disable MIDI out on your plugin

Aaah, that seems to be it!  Thanks so much to both of you for taking the time to find the solution! 

I was trying to recreate this behavior with Cakewalk's stock plugins, and I couldn't.  But it was happening consistently with my Native Instruments plugins.  The difference is, NI plugins default to enabling MIDI out.  

For anyone else experiencing this, I found this thread to be helpful.  The solution is to pull up the Synth Rack View (Alt-9), right click the synths that are doing this, and deselect "Enable MIDI Output".