Using guitar fx board to control live.

[Tekkas]

Hey guys, i have Live8 suite, Edirol FA-66 audio interface, a newly acquired Akai MPK49 and a BOSS GT5 guitar fx pedal board.
I would like to plug the guitar fx into the akai via midi and be able to control and tweak stuff in live.Even simple tasks like triggering samples or clips/scenes when i depress a pedal while i am playing guitar also.Is something like this even remotely possible and is anybody doing this and if so what is your basic setup,and what do you do with it.
I would eventually like to use this kind of setup in a band with a real drummer and bass,vocals etc.......
If anyone could point me in the direction of resources/u-tube vids etc i would also be extremely grateful.

Cheers,

[wasoota]

Short version is you can't, sensibly.

Guitar pedals transmit midi program changes, that's so you can integrate them with an external effects board as in "I select patch 121 'Cool Drive' and I want my reverb FX to go to patch 097".

But Live doesn't do anything with program changes, only midi notes and CC. Fx pedals can and do send CC, but usually only from the 'typical' CC elements like the expression pedal or external footswitches. Guitar Pedals ususally don't (and can't) send MIDI notes. It's not what they're designed to do.

Some GFX pedals allow you to assign CC 'signal impulses' to certain 'patches', but it's complicated and usually 'on top of' what the pedal already does. I.e. it still changes to 'Cool Drive' every time you press the button. You can't change a guitar effects pedal into a midi controller, you can just do some limited midi controlling with it.

That said, you may get lucky. Roland always had some of the more extensive midi implementations on the market in their pedals. But the GT-5 is very old, pretty much the very first floor pedal that tried to offer more advanced features. I have a GS-10 which is pretty much the same pedal on the inside plus a few additionel 'studio' type features, and for a guitar effects unit the midi I can control out of it is a lot, by midi controller standards it isn't though, and it's glitchy and a pain to set up. Check the GT-5 manual for what you can do. What you see there will be pretty much it.

I recommend you either get a Behringer FCB and the modded UNO chip. The FCB lets you assign midi notes and CCs to the buttons and that way you have a live-compatible solution 'out of the box'. No fiddling, no headaches, but yes, another huge pedal on stage. Or, as a cheaper solution, you do one of those 'keyboard mods' you see in the thread on this board and use that. Cheap, compact, but, well... hacky.

[Tekkas]

Nice reply, all i need to know.I'll check out the GT5 user manual.I was kinda thinking of playing the guitar thru gt5's audio out into 2 amps stereo and have whatever LIVE is outputting thru my audio interface into a PA.Being able to riff away and change presets on the gt5 and setting the pedals up to transmit the necessary midi messages to live to tell it to trigger clips/samples scenes and the like.Well, at least i might be able to use the expression pedal for something.I remember once seeing a guy do some creative stuff using a pedal board and feeding the output signal into live via his audio interface,off to youtube i go...

thankyou