Many workarounds have been proposed, all of them revolving around third-party software (Bome’s Midi Translator, Plogue Bidule and such) looping back midi (MidiYoke etc.) or very elaborate midi assignment schemes that have to be loaded as a template in order to work.
Namiheis extensive work with Mackie Control emulation got me thinking: We need to harness all this remote control power! It’s all very nice to be able to load your BCR with a preset, but we need to *control* it!
Here’s the thing: Mackie Control offers MANY of the features frequently asked for by Live users. And it CAN be emulated with nearly all advanced midi controllers!
What you need: A midi controller with user-assignable note-on transmission (TriggerFinger, BCR, MikroKontrol, FCB1010 footpedals, etc) and a spare midi port.
Here’s how it works: The Mackie Control Protocol may be one of the best kept secrets out there. Mackie either licenses the use of the system to other companies, or companies reverse-engineer the Mackie products. But the system is actually built on regular midi note transmission and continuous controllers, spiced up with a little sysex for the displays.
Namihei has already published some of this information on his website, but I will go into a bit more detail here, and I will focus on the requests from the Ableton Live forum.
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The Mackie Control has arrow keys arranged with a zoom button in the center. In session view these keys are used to maneuver up and down and from left to right. The zoom button triggers the currently selected slot. Does this sound good to you?
With this information you can easily assign just a few buttons on your midi controller to navigate all your existing sets, trigger ANY clip or scene, WITHOUT having to make a template set, and without doing manual midi assignments or routing the midi through third party systems.
- Bored yet? If not: Read on!
All you loopers will notice the highlighted Undo
The undo function is, in my limited experience, not quite as responsive in operation as the more brutish delete function, but it’s a step in the right direction… and again, it works in all your setups!?!I also like the Track / Clip view toggle on D#4, and draw tool on/off as well. I hate using modifier keys!
Some more power-user stuff here, as noted by Namihei:
- this will let you assign buttons to AlWAYS arm tracks in all your sets.
So as you can see, this has some serious potential, if nothing else then as a temporary fix until Ableton let's us assign everything to everything, eh?
FYI I'm redoing my FCB setup to look like this:
Anyway, that’s it for now. I think it’s so cool that anyone with a 60€ Behringer Nano-Controller or similar can get full navigation in session view, almost out of the box, don’t you?
This tutorial and our *almost* full list of controllers will be available from the downloads section of The Covert Operators website soon, so come on by!
Cheers!
Andreas @ the Covert Operators
Goddamit, I feel like I've trawled through the whole damn net for this! Very thorough work it would seem.
