Hey,
The short answer is ‘yes this is totally possible and the basic concepts are very easy to implement’
The long answer is ‘both apps are extremely open ended, and both are potentially used differently during the studio (sketching, recording) vs live performance, and there are some edge cases where maybe it is a little complicated but also there is a lot of room for some amazing stuff’
So here are three of my favorite quick tips that might help you get started…
- Within Live, the artist can add an extra MIDI track to their project that is used too specifically send MIDI output to your system. For each slot they can configure MIDI messages that are sent, such as notes and control values.
Depending on how they use Live during a performance, they can either directly trigger the slots, or they can place them in specific rows such that they get activated along with master triggers.
(and of course where things can get kind of fun is that you can have any number of these extra tracks… within the limits of MIDI channels / messages of course…)
In this gif I have Live running on the same machine as VDMX, so I can use the ‘To VDMX’ option for sending MIDI, keep reading for the network side of things.
- The next step would be to instead have the MIDI sent to another computer running VDMX. There are a few ways you can go about this, one of them is using our free MIDI via OSC helper tool: http://vidvox.com/rays_oddsnends/vvopensource_downloads/MIDIviaOSC_0.1.3.zip
(for this, alongside Live, you may want to look into using the IAC Bus from the Audio MIDI Setup utility, but I think this app will also show up as a target from Live when it is running)
This app will take any incoming MIDI and send it as OSC messages – copies of VDMX on the network will show up as targets, or you can manually configure the IP / port.
You can also use this app on the receiving end to convert back to MIDI.
(this is handy with other apps, but though do note that VDMX itself can receive MIDI messages over OSC, as MIDI messages are technically part of the OSC spec itself and we support that, so you can probably skip running the app on your local machine…)
- If some level of clock synchronization is also important, you can also look into using Ableton Link to keep the BPM / measure position in sync,
https://vdmx.vidvox.net/tutorials/ableton-link-in-vdmx
Or you can try MIDI clock,
https://vdmx.vidvox.net/tutorials/receiving-midi-clock-from-ableton-live-in-vdmx
(less flexible but with the latest VDMX update the clock plugin supports time position messages which can be quite useful if the musician is working with the ‘arrangement’ view for playback!)
Hope those are some useful starting points!