MIDI Foot Control Help

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 8:45 pm

SubQ, that's exactly what I'm trying to do, except with a Flextone II (basically, a POD 2 built into an amp.) It's also similar to what losman is doing successfully, except that he has a controller that can go into an effects toggle mode. I suspect that you're going to have the same difficulty as I am, using an FB4 which only sends Prog. Change messages.

So now I'm starting to wonder whether there isn't some little middleware application that can intercept the P.C. messages, translate them into something Live can respond to before sending them along? This is getting a little more complicated than I'd prefer, but it would let me use my preferred hardware...

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 8:53 pm

Looks like Plogue Bidule will do this (translate P.C. messages) but it's like a sledgehammer for a thumbtack.

SubQ · Post by **SubQ** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 8:55 pm

word.
it would be so good to have just a small foot controller like this for looping parts onstage...

the fcb is too big, an overkill for what I want.

Please if you find any solution, share with us... I'm even thinking abou t send the unit to an electronic engineer, to see if he can transform the message tweaking the pedal board itself.

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:04 pm

took an old pedal that came with a delay unit and stuck it into the back of my bcr, works great as a single switch. I tried a pedal that came with an amp, it needed two pushes to send a command.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:10 pm

I'll def. keep ya posted. This has been like an obsession of mine for months, maybe years - a pretty solid indication that there's no obvious solution on the market.

If you can find a good electronics tech who'll work for cheap, there are a number of solutions. Starting with the FB4+bass POD is not what I'd recommend, though, since the interfaces are all wrong (Cat5 to the POD, and then, really, the POD firmware needs to be reprogrammed.)

More reasonably, you could start with a couple of these:
http://www.zzounds.com/item--BEHAB200
And then try to determine which of the small MIDI control surfaces (ie. I'm looking at the Evolution X-Session) lend themselves to having buttons rewired to 1/4" jacks as contact points. Then you'd have a nice control surface with some of the buttons on the floor for hands-free work. IMO these surfaces should have footswitch jacks on 'em out of the factory, but hey, I'm just a guitar-playing dinosaur.

If you wanted something to work out of the box, you could look at one of the MIDI Solutions products that translate ordinary footswitches like the above to MIDI, but these are a bit spendy.

I may also take my FCB1010 apart and see whether it's at all modular inside - eg. how much deadweight can I cut off the thing before I break it LOL. But getting rid of the AC dependency is the hard part.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:13 pm

took an old pedal that came with a delay unit and stuck it into the back of my bcr, works great as a single switch.

Sorta what I'm talking about above. Alot of the little keyboard controllers (ie Axiom) have a couple of jacks too. Generally sustain and expression. Now if your little control surfaces eg XPress Pro had inputs 1-4 on the back, you'd be set.

I tried a pedal that came with an amp, it needed two pushes to send a command.

Right, one's called a latch pedal, and one's called an unlatch. Like I said, this is an obsession...

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Mon Dec 11, 2006 9:22 pm

P.S. SubQ, I just noticed you said FBV4, not FB4, which means you're running a Bass PODxt? This may behave differently than the 1st generation PODs/Flextones, so you should go ahead and try it and see what Abe's MIDI Learn mode picks up.

SubQ · Post by **SubQ** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 1:06 pm

No, m. it's a FB4 indeed, i have the old pod.

More reasonably, you could start with a couple of these:
http://www.zzounds.com/item--BEHAB200
And then try to determine which of the small MIDI control surfaces (ie. I'm looking at the Evolution X-Session) lend themselves to having buttons rewired to 1/4" jacks as contact points. Then you'd have a nice control surface with some of the buttons on the floor for hands-free work. IMO these surfaces should have footswitch jacks on 'em out of the factory, but hey, I'm just a guitar-playing dinosaur. Mad

So this means that I can plug one of these A-B Units to the BCR Footswicth jack, and have for midi commands on my foot?

hell, if it's true, i'm done. two buttons for arm and disarm in two channels, two for scene and track navigation, our four loop tracks, keeping navigation only on my faderfoxes, as usual.

beautiful

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 2:40 pm

So this means that I can plug one of these A-B Units to the BCR Footswicth jack, and have for midi commands on my foot?

Depends - how many pedal jacks are there on the back of the BCR? You can't daisy chain these pedals; it's one pedal per jack, and that's assuming they're the right kind of jacks. (That dual pedal from Behringer would actually require a cable for each switch, if used like this.) Based on Tone Deft's post, I gather there's at least one, but that probably wont be enough for you?

T.D. can you fill us in on the BCR?

I went nuts last night trying to get the Bidule demo to convert the Line 6 PC messages to note numbers or whatever. But either Live is too limited in rewire mode or I just don't get Bidule programming... I couldn't make it work. Any Bidule-masters out there ever do anything like this.

Anyway, I've got my fingers crossed that the Digitech Control 8 (8th Street Music actually had one, and shipped it!) won't suck.

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 6:32 pm

mbenigni wrote:
So this means that I can plug one of these A-B Units to the BCR Footswicth jack, and have for midi commands on my foot?
Depends - how many pedal jacks are there on the back of the BCR? You can't daisy chain these pedals; it's one pedal per jack, and that's assuming they're the right kind of jacks. (That dual pedal from Behringer would actually require a cable for each switch, if used like this.) Based on Tone Deft's post, I gather there's at least one, but that probably wont be enough for you?

T.D. can you fill us in on the BCR?

there are two jacks in the back of the bcr, you cannot split those into 4 jacks. the jacks on the back of the bcr convert a switch closing/opening into midi, the pedals don't send midi, otherwise the jacks would be midi ports.

I plugged the pedal into the jack and stepped on it, the green footswitch 1 LED lit up on the BCR, I stomped the pedal again and the LED turned off. I then held down edit while stepping on the pedal again and was able to edit the paramters the pedal sent.

stick with bomes a bit longer, I haven't set one up but I've seen screens and watched the results, uber powerful.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:08 pm

What's bomes? (Simultaneously heading off to google.)

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:12 pm

mbenigni wrote:What's bomes? (Simultaneously heading off to google.)

http://www.bome.com/midi/translator/

yeah, bidule is pretty heavy, like Reaktor Lite, or a very light version of Max/MSP, I'd love to get into that stuff but I fear I'd never make music again.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:15 pm

Yeah, I dropped about an hour into it last night, and I wouldn't mind investing more time if there weren't the probability of its being a dead end. You just never know. The Bidule setup looks to be Rewire-based and I understand there are some serious caveats using Live w/ Rewire. So I couldn't tell whether I was just "doing it wrong" or whether what I wanted wasn't supported. There's only so much of that you can take.

I kinda feel the same way about Bomes just looking at the website. Unless someone can assure me it'll work, I'll keep looking for a hardware solution.

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:18 pm

I can assure you that Kid Beyond and other people I know have used Bomes to convert commands from an FCB1010 into keystrokes in Live. I saw one guy's setup screen and it was really butt simple, just a few lines of commands, you list what comes in then next to it how it goes out. It's not rewire based, it sits on the OS and spits out commands.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Tue Dec 12, 2006 7:59 pm

I can assure you that Kid Beyond and other people I know have used Bomes to convert commands from an FCB1010 into keystrokes in Live.

Maybe but the FCB1010 is a different animal. It doesn't send these useless PC messages.

It's not rewire based, it sits on the OS and spits out commands.

That does sound really good. OK one last shot - I'll try the demo tonight.

Now I've gone from no solutions to 2 potential solutions (FBV+Bomes, or the Digi Control 8 ) at the same time. Aint that always the way.