These days I use Cubase 5 for my main recording, Buzz tracker for hammering out sequences and effects but recently I stumbled on Ableton for a bit of a test run. I have the KORG nano series controllers, Alphatrack, BCF2000 and an Evolution MK-461C keyboard. Within a few hours I had all these devices playing nicely in Ableton, controlling all the channel volumes, drums and effects. Using Bomes MIDI Translator Pro I also had copy, paste and duplicate functions creating cuts and samples etc on the fly.
This software just felt very fluent to an old tracker based musician such as myself and I just had to get more in to the thing. After experimenting with pads on my nanoPad to trigger clips I decided to look into APC/Launchpad areas for some fun control. My desk is already full of control surfaces (with an MPD on the way) and the APC looked too big for me (and the 9 faders without motorized control was a bit lame after using the BCF and AT). So I decided on the Launchpad which I found 2nd hand for a bargain thanks to eBay.
It arrived at my work on the Friday and I was very excited to get home and start playing. After everything was installed and I updated Ableton to get the Launchpad control surface remote file I loaded up, configured and saw the pads light up to life. I pressed play on my AlphaTrack, triggered a couple of clips to start things off and....
Problem...
Not in a hardware sense, but in a worse sense. Something that can't be "fixed".
I am color blind with certain shades of RED. The cheap use of green/red dual LEDs to produce the colours is a BIG issue for people like me. In CLIP view, the entire grid appears the EXACT same color for loaded and playing clips. I could tell absolutely no difference. The thing is though, if you go to the mixer page the intensity of the green/amber LEDs is different and I can easily see the difference. butb in clip view the leds are so bright that I cannot register the Green from the Amber pads. For those that don't suffer this it's hard to imagine but I am sure I am not the only one since this is a common form of color blindness.
I have contacted Novation who say they are aware of the issue and are looking into it (we will see). My theory is that the remote script files (that can't be decompiled easily/at all) should be able to control the color/intensity of these files and should be able to be modified to just dim the leds in clip view a bit more. This would be great
Being impatient I have managed to create a "stop-gap" solution until someone can help me out on this. I am into Photography as well and I just happen to have some color filter lenses. When I look at the launchpad through a RED filter I can instantly see the difference in colors. I tested a filter over the buttons using a couple of layers of red transparent contact (used for covering childrens books) and it made a big difference. It was easy to see the differences in colors at the slight trade off of making the pads slightly duller (but still very easy to see). I put a nice layer down over the buttons and... it looked like shit but did do the trick. This was short lived as the contact caused buttons to stick down etc so I was forced to think again.
Taking the launchpad to my workbench I pulled it apart (easy done) and removed the rubber membrane. I then set about cutting out 64 round "filters" to stick on the underside of the trigger pads. I don't need to filter the control buttons. This took a couple of hours but has worked. I played on the controller all day and did not miss a cue.
I would love an actual programming fix for this but for others that are out there with issues seeing the colors, I hope this is of some comfort.
