MIDI Beat Clock
Introduction
Using external MIDI devices alongside Pro Tools is great, but I see a lot of people only scratching the surface and I wonder is that out of choice?, or just because they are not aware of the options Pro Tools provides to make life easier.
For example, you may have an external synth which you love the sound of, so you plug the sound outputs of it into the inputs of your Pro Tools sound card and capture that sound you love, great, but what happens if you have a delay effect on that synth? Or a sequenced arpeggiator? in walks the problem of synchronicity. It’s at this point that I have seen people remove delays from their external devices and place a plug-in on the track within Pro Tools instead as they clock right to the BPM of the session.
In this article I am going to introduce you to the offerings of MIDI beat clock within Pro Tools which allows you to clock your external MIDI devices to the timings of your session with ease. It’s worth noting that not all devices are capable of this, you are looking to see if your device supports receiving a MIDI beat clock, and if so, read ahead.
Transmitting
Let’s first look at getting Pro Tools setup to transmit a MIDI clock signal for your external devices to receive.
From the Setup navigate to Setup > MIDI > MIDI Beat Clock from which you should be presented with a dialog window as seen below.
At the very top you will want to check the box labelled “Enable MIDI Beat Clock for…”, you will then notice a list of MIDI devices underneath, these are the devices, when checked, that you wish to receive the clock signal. You may find that if your MIDI interface does not support transmitting to specific MIDI ports that only the specific interface title will be offered as a destination.
You may need to activate your external device to receive the signal and line up with it, in these cases you should refer to the manual in which it should be relatively easy to find, it is usually down to something as simple as a menu option that needs changing.
You will notice the option on the right hand side of the window to enter an offset value in samples, this is to help account for delay in the time taken between the MIDI signal being sent by one device and received by another. We obviously want to avoid any timing issues where possible so let’s look at calculating that offset so we can get everything inline.
Offset
Different devices will hold different fixed latencies, this is the reason why Pro Tools allows you to apply an offset to individual devices on a port-by-port basis. So by now your external device should be receiving the signal and synchronising to it, now we have to calculate and input any timing differences which have have occurred to keep everything tight, which after all is the reason we set the beat clock up in the first place!
To determine the MIDI beat clock offset between your MIDI interface and the external receiver, first ensure that the two are connected and have been activated as we discussed in the section above. You will want to ensure that the audio output of your external device is plugged into the input of your Pro Tools interface and that you are seeing the incoming signal within your Pro Tools session when it is triggered.
You will then want to make sure your device is ready to play back something that will be easy to line up with within your edit window, something that is ‘on the beat’ such as a single drum hit with a sharp transient works best.
Create a new Pro Tools session ensuring that the MIDI beat clock is activated and is being sent to the device you wish to test for delay. Set the main time scale to Bars|Beats as shown in the image below:
Next, create a new audio track and set the input to be the sound output of your external device. Record enable that track and start recording, if set up correctly, this should send the MIDI beat clock to your external device triggering it to play on the beat of your session. A couple of bars of recording will suffice, when you are happy you have enough content, stop recording.
You should now have an audio track within your Pro Tools session which holds audio data that has come from your external device after it was triggered by the beat clock, still with me?
Next we are going to enable Grid Mode so that we can see a grid and snap to it:
Using the selector tool, place the cursor on a straight beat of the grid before a transient, for example if you are working in a 4/4 session, place the cursor precisely on the first beat of that bar, with Grid Mode enabled you should be able to click roughly near the beat and the cursor will snap to the precise grid point.
We now have a place to measure the delay, the time difference between the Pro Tools grid beat and the start of the transient from your external instrument.
Next turn on Tab To Transient and after doing so hit the shortcut Shift + Tab, this will select the space between the selected grid point and the transient recorded.
Next, without losing that selection, head up to the top of the edit window and change the main time scale to Samples, notice that the display window to the right on the time scale display will now show you the length of the selection in samples, this is roughly the offset timing that we need to correct! Easy right?
Now we know we have an offset of 215 samples, we can head back into the MIDI beat clock dialog window and enter the value. Remember that in the recording the transient was 200 samples late, so we need to set an offset value of -215 to get everything back in line.
Take Note
Once you have figured out the offset value required for you external devices, write them down! Should you start a new session in the future and want to use your device again you will have the values to hand for a quick setup so you can spend the time recording and not wasting time calculating latency!
Final Words
We hope you have found this article useful and if anything has given you another string for the bow of Pro Tools knowledge to woo people with next time you’re in the studio!
It makes sense to have the software perform as much as it can for you, especially if it will save you time not having to try and sync things after recording when you didn’t realise Pro Tools could do it for you in the first place!
Any questions give us a shout!
thanks for this article, i’ve been avoiding using midi with protools for a long time, just manually shifting things onto the beat.
i am wondering if there are more tips in this area, such as quantising what you’re playing freehand on an external synth?
my set up is a pyramid sequencer being controlled by midi beat clock, which then sends clock to the rest of my studio/synths.
i have several synths that are midi inputs to the pyramid, which then usb’s to protools. so i’m hoping i can record the midi for each of those devices chained in, i already have tracks in a default template for each synth, i guess i could put a midi track with each, set to the appropriate channel… i’ll read your article on recording midi and hopefully that will have what i need to know!
Hi,
You know if there is a possibility to unloop the midi beat clock ? Some of my drum machines react very badly with mbc in Pro Tools when loop mode is activated.
I found this in a 2008 thread : (a tech from avid wrote this quote)
“Pro Tools currently loops around MIDI Beat Clock (MBC) when playing in a loop (…) While most external devices should not have a problem with quick jumps of Song Position Pointer (SPP) messages, certain hardware sequencers will behave erratically at the loop point. We are looking to introduce a preference that will allow users to switch between looped and unlooped MBC clock”
You know if this unlooped MBC is available ? I don’t find it. I haven’t found any thread on this problem since 2008, i cannot believe that nobody have a Tr-808/Tr-909 synced with Pro Tools w/ loop mode today 🙁
Thanks for reading
Hi, I’ve been using Beat Clock in PT for years (never tried the offset trick but I’m gonna). However I have an issue that I’ve never quite figured out, just worked around it when I needed to. Many of the Arp/Sequence patches that exist in these outboard synths these days are made for specific styles of music, for example, electronic dance music that is best played at BPM’s of 140, 150 even 170 and beyond! However the music I make is more so around 70 to about 110 BPM and what often happens is that when I create a song at (let’s say) 80 BPM and I come across a patch on a synth that I really like (regardless of it’s creator’s original intent), when I try to sync it up to PT, it turns out that the BPM on the patch is 2x’s too fast for my track. So what the Beat Clock in PT winds up doing is slowing a patch designed for 160 BPM “ALL” the way down to 80 BPM (twice as slow). What I end up hearing is a patch that should be playing 8th notes or 16th notes, is now playing 1/4 notes or 8th notes instead (super slow!). The workaround I’ve been able to use to “trick” my synth into playing the right notes at the right speed is to “double up” the tempo of my song. In this scenario, I would have to change my 80 BPM temporarily to 160 BPM, record the patch, then change the song back to 80 BPM. At the end of the day, it works but sometimes making drastic tempo changes can really mess with your session, moving audio to different places on the edit grid and whatnot, it can be a pain. So I’m just curious, is there a proper way to make this switch work correctly? Perhaps a setting in Pro Tools that can change the Beat Clock time measure from 4/4 to 4/8 or something? Just a thought. Thanks!
hey i think what you’re after is setting the clock divisions in the sequencer/synth. so if it’s 1/4 you get four beats per bar, but if it’s 1/16 you get 16 beats in the same bar. look it up in your manual to see how you can control and change the lock division for the presets you want to use. i usually then save the new versionn of the preset with the clock division i want. hope this helps.
Excellent explanation and clear on the details. Thanks!
I’ll probably never get this answered here but I’ll give it a shot. I have repeated the instructions a few times and notice one thing i do not see discussed anywhere. Drift. My question is…is there slight drift for the resulting triggered note like +/- 25 samples for any hit? I notice that in the recorded MIDI noted from my device…even after adjusting the offset…I’ll see hits that are + or – 25 samples or so…sometimes more. Are the hits supposed to be “perfectly” on the beat or have a little wiggle room.
Hey, don’t know if this is the fix for your situation but I had a drifting issue with a vintage Roland MKS-80 that I hooked up to my PT system. I was just recording plain MIDI performances (because it doesn’t have an arpeggiator or anything) but when I played back the MIDI track, the notes were WAY off. After much research and going to the forums (got my answer at gearslutz.com, it was the fact that I was sending MIDI messages that my module didn’t want or need (i.e Beat Clock, MMC etc) that was somehow jamming up the information that it was receiving. After I turned all of those extra signals off (just to that port), my issue cleared up immediately! Don’t know if that’s your issue but it’s worth a try. Good luck!
Thanks for this! Was trying to sync my Beatstep Proto to Pro Tools so I can use sequence my modular and this did the trick! Cheers!
I just discovered this Pro Tools production web site by chance, looking for MIDI sync information.
I find it very interesting.
Glad to hear it!
Hi,
I´m having problems when syncing external devices.
I have sync my MPC2000xl (slave) to ProTools11 (Master). Everything is working fine at this point but if I play some notes on a new midi track the MPC stops. Any Idea of what I´m doing wrong?
Thanks