Ableton Forum

Hello,

I have a launchpad and I'd like to make it work similarily to the Push controllers Scale mode (all the notes in the scale light up a certain color). I've been thinking of ways to make this work on LP.

I've thought about doing this in user 1 mode. I'd map the individual notes and then use the velocity to color code them. I'm not sure if this is going to work and wanted to know if anyone found a way to make this work.

I understand a fairly simple remedy would be to drag the SCALE midi effect, however, I want to intuitively know which note I'm playing in stead of randomly hitting every pad and having it be in the scale.

Any thoughts appreciated. I'm going to be working on this tonight when I get off work.

Find the launchpad96 script. There is a thread on here for it. It is the greatest thing in all the lands.

yes I've heard of this script. I'll be honest when I say I've avoided using it bc I'm somewhat afraid of downloading something that will run and take over the native scripts of LP.

I was hoping to achieve this by just using ableton live 9, my LP, and creativeness.

It is a folder of scripts. You place it in the directory amongst all the other Control Surface scripts.

It doesn't actually get 'installed'.

I'd suggest trying it out at least since it doesn't have any real effect on your system aside from taking up a few kb's.

And to help you feel more confident in trying it, I'll also mention that you can not only simply choose not to use it, and go back to the default script. But this script itself retains all of the functionality of the original. The only difference being, you tap User 1 and 2 more than once to switch between extra features.

Thanks a lot for your help and the added info on the launchpad95 script. I think I will take a look and give it a go. In the meantime, I think I found a little hack for making the launchpad play in a scale mode with visual feedback in user 1. I'll try to explain to the best of my abilities below, I may post a video but I've never tried to make one before (and nothings worst then a poorly made tutorial

Here's what I did:

I started with two midi tracks. In the first midi track I dragged the instrument I wanted to 'jam' with (I think I choose some weird sounding mallet). The second midi track I used primarily as a dummy track to visually 'light up' my scale- I decided that I wanted the scale to be in A minor. I drew in an A Minor Scale and made all the notes play from the beginning to the end of my bar. This made the notes of my scale continuously light up in user 1 mode. I also duplicated this bar and transposed the notes up an octave (so I could jam on a 2 octave range). I then color coded by using velocity (this is obviously optional). I use velocity of 75 to get the nice bright red for my tonic/root note (A), and then vel of 124 for bright green for the other notes in the scale (FYI- I believe 113 and/or 111 for velocity give you the brightest orange & 127 vel give you the brighest yellow).

I then made sure my first midi track was armed and sure enough I started jamming away on my A minor scale. To make sure nothing odd happened, I opened up another midi track and drag on a synth from analog and made a loop with a few chords in A minor. The make shift jam sounded good and hopefully this may help someone. You'll obviously have to create this for each project you make but it doesn't take much time.

Sounds promising. If you like how a channel works (the one you created for the velocities and notes for instance), you can drag it into your user browser for later use in another project. Then you wouldn't have to recreate it every time.

If you put it into a Rack and assigned some macros for transposing or scaling or whatever, it could be pretty flexible.

Thanks a lot for the tip. I'm gonna have to get better in saving presets for enhanced workflow in subsequent projects (I also haven't dabled much into using macros to my advantage so something I'm gonna have to get creative with). When I started working with ableton back in early summer I would create a custom drum rack everytime I opened up a new project... . I then started saving the presets and now I can get right to working instead of wasting 40 minutes auditioning drum hits haha

yur2die4 wrote:Find the launchpad96 script. There is a thread on here for it. It is the greatest thing in all the lands.

If you have a Launchpad, this is an absolute essential imho. It transforms the Launchpad into something amazing. Utterly Brilliant.
If you want to switch back to 'normal' (out of the box) Launchpad, just change the 'Control Surface' setting in the midi preferences back from Launchpad95 to Launchpad.