The unrivalled control over MIDI & Piano Roll visuals that you’ve always wanted

OVERVIEW

Eyedrop is a Piano Roll note editing device purely focused on visuals and light effect production for Launchpads and similar devices. Eyedrop works with any MIDI Clip, any color palette, and any physical MIDI device. Its intended use is to be able to expand on the *2, /2, rev, and inv commands already supplied by Ableton Live, by adding easy control for velocity selection, transform controls, gradient generation, note shifting, pinching, and much more. All of these controls over MIDI unlock new possibilities for lightshow production in the simplest way imaginable.

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When MIDI notes are selected, clicking on any of the colors in the palette view will change all of the selected notes to that specific velocity number immediately. The number you have just chosen will show in the text box underneath, and also can be typed into the box if you know the velocity numbers without needing to see the color palette view. Typing in a number and hitting enter will then change all selected MIDI notes to that velocity. However, if you have no notes selected and then pick a velocity, it will change the input velocity of your Launchpad so you can draw MIDI notes into the piano roll and have the color set before you even start. This helps dramatically in draw mode

These controls will take your currently selected notes and rotate or mirror the currently selected MIDI around the center of the Launchpad Pro layout. So for example, if a light effect is created only using LEDs in the top right corner of the Launchpad Pro, rotating it clockwise will rotate the MIDI and move it to the bottom right corner, rather than rotating in place. The same goes for mirroring, horizontal mirror will flip from left to right, and vertical mirroring will mirror from top to bottom. All of these transform controls can also be clicked while holding alt, to rotate or mirror as usual, but also clone the MIDI to make two of itself, one set of notes from before the transformation, and one set from after the transformation.

Ableton by default is limited to only having the ability to shift in either direction by 1 step or 12 steps, which works really nicely for producing music as it shifts in octaves and semitones. But for Launchpad lightshows it helps to be able to shift the MIDI by 4 spaces quickly.

Pinching MIDI allows for steady speed ramping of notes to allow for really intense, but subtle and smooth build-ups in speed. This works amazingly well as a tool for producers too to be able to pinch MIDI in certain directions to create note speed increases directly in the piano roll. This works as a great visual effect too for fast build-ups in sections or even if you just need your light effects to slap a little bit harder, this is an amazing solution. The only known issues with this so far are that sometimes higher note counts won’t pinch the MIDI as expected, but this still works perfectly for smaller effects.

Doubling and halving notes in Eyedrop is not the same as Ableton. These controls will change the note length only and not the length of the entire selection, meaning you can make quick adjustments to new gradients or the time certain LEDs stay on for.

Creating gradients has never been too easy in Ableton Live, it involves the copy-pasting of the same effect over and over again, dragging a tiny little bar at the bottom of the piano roll window in order to choose a certain velocity. This is no longer the case, Now it’s as simple as selecting a few notes, setting how the colors duplicate, picking a gradient length and spacing, and then hitting generate. It’s that simple. To select which colors to use, click on any of the 16 color bars and pick a color from the window at the top, or type in a number in the selector above the palette. It’s also possible to share gradients around as tiny text files and load them up into Eyedrop to set specific colors. It’s now possible to loop the gradient as well, with its 16 stage generation process and 64 loops, it’s possible to generate a new gradient of up to 1,024 notes in one click. The spacing intervals can be chosen from a select range of options of standard quantized values, or select smallest or biggest spacing to set the spacing to the smallest or the longest notes in the currently selected range of notes. If all notes are the same length, it won’t matter if you choose smallest or largest, but use these two spacing methods to quickly select the exact spacing of your selected notes. Gradient mode has been tested to generate over 130,000 notes in one click.

These shifting controls work similarly to the shifting up and down by 8 or 4, but shift notes in terms of their position on a Launchpad Pro. This shifter will shift your entire light effect across a 10x10 XY grid to the exact location you choose. The corner notes however aren’t shown on the Launchpad and get shifted to the remaining 4 notes above D#8 if an effect is moved onto the corner of this 10x10 grid. This allows for quick movement of light effects across the odd middle point of the scaling of a Launchpad Pro and might be an easier solution for some.

This toggle will switch between BUTTON and TOGGLE note mode. This allows for production using MicroLight, it allows for clicking on and toggling of each note when being clicked on when Eyedrop is used in an input track in Ableton Live. BUTTON mode is the standard way of allowing MIDI through into a MIDI clip and producing MIDI data. TOGGLE mode will allow the ability to tap a note for it to come on and stay on, and one tap again to turn it off, allowing you to hit the right arrow in Ableton Live and record the held MIDI into a clip. Clicking “Reset all Toggle notes” will set all note toggles off and reset all values so that you can draw a new frame of your light effect.

The custom palette switcher allows users to switch between the standard Launchpad Pro palette and any other Retina based RGB palette in an RGB range of 0-63. The default alternate palette is the Launchpad S palette, but can be swapped out for any other palette and will show the full palette in both the color picker window and gradient generation window.