Ableton Forum

I'm trying to set up a MIDI pedal to cycle through track ARM buttons for playing through a live set. The idea is that I have all my VST instruments set up and then I press the pedal to cycle them.

My midi controller is capable of sending a wide variety of messages (I can assign a pedal to increase/decrease PROGRAM CHANGE, for instance) but I can't for the life of me figure out how to teach live to assign this to a midi track's ARM button. When I send PROGRAM CHANGE 1, the MIDI light in the upper-righthand corner lights up. When I try to assign this message in the midi mapper, nothing happens. Help!

EDIT: Intermittently, Live reads the PROGRAM CHANGE message as "Pitchbend."

That's pretty weird.

what pedal are you using>?

I'm plugging a sustain pedal into my keyboard and configuring my keyboard to send PROGRAM CHANGE ("C0 00") whenver it's pressed. I've manually confirmed that it's sending the right message with Bome's Midi Translator.

Live reads them as Pitchbend.

i think the bigger problem may be whether it's possible to achieve this functionality in live -- nevermind what cc's the controller is sending

i suspect that this would need to involve some other intermediate program to generate the cycling midi messages - maybe bidule or PD or max or something like that

??

My MIDI controller is capable of cycling the messages. It sends "C0 00" the first time, "C0 01" the second time, "C0 02" the third time, etc. etc. I've confirmed this with Bome and it's definately working.

The problem is that these messages in Live's Midi mapping window are labeled "Pitchbend" instead of "Program change" or "c0 [whatever]". Live, for whatever reason, is treating a "C0" messages as a pitchbend. WTF?

edit: any chance of sending some other type of midi info from your pedal rather than program changes?

Well program change would be by far the best, because my midi controller can actually cycle the messages (send 1 then 2 then 3 then 4 etc.) and then each message can be mapped to a different arm button in Live.

Here's the response I just got from Ableton on this issue:

Hello Drew,

Live is not able to use program change messages for remote controlling,
only normal Midi CC are supported.

Best,
Dom Wilms
ableton ag

Which majorly sucks. Does anyone know a program that can convert Program Change to some other type of message? Or a program that will cycle messages for me so that I can set my pedal to a single MSG and map the output to multiple ARM buttons?

Worst comes to worst, I might get out C# and try to code something together. :/