REAPER + shortcircuit = MPC-style track mute (for live looping performace)?

[(tuesday)]

hey guys,

i've been trying to figure out how to use REAPER for live loop-based performance. i'd like to be able to do something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRRpLjEaqxs

he's using an MPC in track mute mode, which, as you can see from this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I53UO-K6ViE

...won't turn the loops on or off right when you hit the button, but at the next loop point. which makes sense when you're watching damu's fingers in the first video, because he's always hitting the buttons before the beat, basically telling the machine "turn this loop on/off at the next loop point."

so, i've been trying to figure out a way to use REAPER in this way, controlling it with my (soon to arrive in the mail) korg padkontrol.

so far i've come up with an (admittedly inelegant) solution. my idea is this (i'll track it backwards from the sound to the controller):

1) create a track in reaper and place shortcircuit in it as a VST. this will be my audio output track. optionally, set the audio output of shortcircuit to a series of tracks if i want realtime FX on them.

2) load my loops into shortcircuit so that each one has a unique MIDI note assigned to it. set them up as one-shots (so, not loops at all really).

3) for every track i want to be muting/unmuting, set up a track on reaper that consists only of a short MIDI note at the beginning of every loop to trigger shortcircuit. so they're not actually looping, just getting constantly re-triggered by these MIDI notes. if my longest sound is four bars long, i'd only have one MIDI note at the beginning of that track; if there's e.g. a drum loop that's only one bar long playing simultaneously, i'd have to have a MIDI note at the beginning of every bar.

4) highlight the (four-bar in this case) MIDI sequence in REAPER, and set playback to loop.

5) assign a different set of MIDI notes (or if possible CC messages -- because apparently those stay lit on the padkontrol?) from the padkontrol to mute/unmute REAPER's MIDI tracks, thus, turning on/off the MIDI notes that are triggering shortcircuit *without affecting the audio tracks themselves*.

6) mute all tracks except those representing loops i want playing from the beginning of the song.

7) press play.

thus, when the MIDI tracks are muted in the middle of a performance, all that is in fact muted is the signal to shortcircuit to play the loop again, so it'll play to the end but then not play it again. likewise, if the track is unmuted, it won't start playing the audio until it reaches the next MIDI note.

the downsides to all this are:

1) it's kind of cumbersome, but much more importantly:
2) there's no visual feedback at all. i don't know which track each button on my padkontrol will mute or unmute without memorizing it or drawing a diagram, and i also can't check to see which tracks are muted or not. MPCs only have that crappy little LED screen but it's still a lot more than this setup gives me.

does anybody have any more elegant solutions (other than "switch to ableton")?

could i maybe use seq24 for this task (i admit i don't know much about that program or how it works)?

[Caustic]

the mpc track mute buttons only mute the seqence running, the sequence is already in time so track mute works more like a mute button on a mixer for selected track, i have one here and there is definately no option to trigger loop at end of bar, if your playing loops live you goota be acurate if your just muting the tracks of the sequencer it doesnt matter so much

[(tuesday)]

well it definitely will mute only at the end of the bar, like in the second video...

[Caustic]

mpc records like a midi pattern that triggers the audio samples and mutes the pattern rather than the audio so if the loop went for 4 bars and was only triggered at the start of a 4 bar pattern and you pressed track mute you would only mute that pattern not the audio track, so next loop it wouldnt play, rather than being cut off suddenly/and same if you track mute while the sample is playing it will always play to end of sample not end of bar/sequence. guru, buzz, ableton have things like this but i dont think they do it quite the same as an mpc

just trying to help

[(tuesday)]

but that's exactly what i'm saying, and what i'm suggesting as a way to reproduce this in REAPER: create a MIDI pattern in REAPER that triggers the audio through shortcircuit, then mute and unmute the tracks in this MIDI pattern, rather than the audio tracks themselves.

[Caustic]

but wouldnt it be easier just to run guru or buzz as a vst inside of reaper or something like that? i remember spending a bit of time with guru and it was the closest software clone of an mpc a few years ago and worked as a vst, buzz is awesome but strange but can do amazing things.
i will let others answer now

[(tuesday)]

well that's also what i was asking, if there's a (preferably cheap/free) plugin that will allow me to do this in a better, more elegant manner, with visual feedback. i'm not familiar enough with buzz or guru to know what they're capable of.

[Caustic]

buzz is free, buzzmachines.com, difficult to use and learn, guru is made by bfd, and works fine as vst and is closet thing to mpc in software imo

[marcus82]

look up "poise vst" and your search will be over.

short circuit is way too unintuitive. Don't get me wrong, it works but you've got to build some muscle memory with that thing.

Poise is a wonderful, simple MPC vst. It's free to demo and a full license is $50.

[(tuesday)]

caustic: thanks for the recommendations, i'm looking into them now!

marcus: i'm familiar with poise, but from what i've seen it only works as a drum sampler, i haven't seen it do what i'm looking for.

i'm comfortable enough with shortcircuit to use it for the sampler portion of my hypothetical setup, what i'm really looking for is something that will make the midi sequencer and track mute part of it more intuitive and give me some visual feedback as to what tracks are muted.

[Caustic]

guru if i remember has a large section where you can "track mute" any part via midi or pc keyboard or whatever controller u use, has good visual feedback too i dont know why this program didnt get huge i think its been discontinued maybe

[(tuesday)]

guru as such has been discontinued, but geist is supposedly its successor.