I spent some time this morning setting up a Faderfox MX12 to work with my Syntakt. I’ve got the faders doing track levels and the A and B pots running mod wheel and breath controller, respectively. The D buttons are handling track mutes. I was going to set the encoder to pitch bend but you learn something new everyday and today what I learned is that pitch bend is not a midi CC.
So I have the encoder’s rotation and its pushbutton functions left to assign as well as one whole row of buttons (one per track). What would you good people do?
I hadn’t been aware of this controller, looks cool! Looked at the manual, and it looks like it does send AT and PB, though PB may be trickier as a bipolar parameter (harder to find the center). Those sound macro controls are great for setting up scenes on a per-pattern basis and those are definitely the controls I’d go for, too. (I set all tracks to receive the same midi channel myself for combined macros so that BC is a percussion break, or AT is a key change, etc.) I’d bet a lot depends on how your existing tracks are set up.
I’m not sure exactly how I’d set it up if I had one. I’d maybe take a row of the buttons for various FX settings? Or, because I tend not to use track levels, I’d probably set some faders to macro control and some to FX settings (reverb and delay volume and feedback), and break out the old label maker. Lots of fun possibilities to explore!
How well does it do at catching CC values from ST and avoiding jumps?
HA! Perhaps I should have given full disclosure in my opener: Yesterday morning I spent more than an hour pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to assign anything to anything and when I finally grasped it and got all the CCs I wanted in place I consulted the ST manual for the pitchbend CC# and couldn’t find one. So I googled the CC for pitchbend and that’s when I found out that it’s not a numbered CC but its own kind of midi message. After the earlier ordeal I was not immediately mentally prepared to get back into the MX12 manual. I only have English to work with and I am certainly well impressed that a guy whose first language is not English could compose such a manual. But I still had a hard time figuring it out at first due to the slight differences in the way things are phrased as compared to how a native English speaker might phrase them. Now that I’ve wrapped my head around it, it’s all making sense just fine. Thank you very much for reading the manual and reminding me that this thing does indeed send pitchbend! However it seems it’s no good for the ST. The encoder has detents and one click in either direction instantly sends the PB value to -128 whether or not the encoder is in bipolar mode. Instead I now have it assigned to aftertouch and it works great.
I appreciate your insight as to how you’d wield BC and AT. I doubt I’d have thought of that myself or if I did who knows how long it would’ve taken? Various (most?) settings will change from where I have them now. I haven’t really set about composing anything in earnest just yet. I wanted to learn how to map it out and get sort of a generic setup together first. I still don’t know what I’ll do with my remaining row of buttons or the encoder pushbutton function but all that along with any necessary changes to my current assignments will surely be revealed as I build a song or two.
Unfortunately the values jump even when the mode is set to “snap”. From what I’ve read in at least one other thread around here I’m pretty sure the Octatrack is the only Elektron device that sends the right messages to the MX12 to make snap work correctly. But I’m new to this thing and I’d love it if someone were to swing thru here and show me where I’m wrong about that.
I’m also using this as an opportunity to dive deeper into the Syntakt than I have so far. I remember you had some very cool ST videos early on and I will absolutely be looking those up again to see what I can glean.
Cool! Yeah, I’ve been casually looking around for controllers, and it’s pretty rare that they send AT and PB, both of which fall outside of CC. (Recently tried, but returned bc of poor pad quality, MPD226, which does MW, BC, and AT.) So I was interested after seeing the form factor of MX 12 what it could do.
You might want to check out Oscillator Sink’s video on ST macros, too, he sets them up on a beatstep Pro a little more knobs-per-channel, maybe better for the MX 12 layout and has iirc some cool sound design and other ideas in there as usual.
I’m a big fan of Oscillator Sink so I’ll certainly follow up on that tip. I’ll also post any relevant stuff that I get up to in this thread in case anyone might be interested. I’m sure it’ll be a bit before I get any results worth sharing though.
MPDs and Novation Launch Stations are controllers I’ve been curious about for awhile but I’ve not yet tried either. I do have a Faderfox EC4 but so far I have only used that one with a Blackbox and it works like a champ. BB’s midi learn makes setting it up an absolute breeze. I wish ST had midi learn.
I’d probably assign filter frequency to the rotary, or one of the fx sends. As for the push/buttons, I use those less with controllers. Maybe assign to “route track to fx block”, if that has a midi cc.
I just had a glance at the manual and I’m not seeing it. That would be brilliant though. I can see setting up the FX block in a fairly extreme way and dropping a track or two into it for some quick and impactful changes to the sound. Oh well I’ll keep thinking.
I’m using all the green buttons as track mutes because I fancy the idea of being able to noodle on the ST keyboard while also being able to mute a track or two. We’ll see if this idea withstands the real needs of a song though.
I saw somewhere around here that you recently mentioned that the editor is one of your favorite things about the EC4. I have to admit that I’ve not yet used it. It’s just so easy to use the midi learn on the Blackbox that I haven’t even looked in to doing it any other way. I’m sure I will at some point though.
MX12 ships with a bunch of removable labels but I bought mine secondhand so I got none of those. At the moment I don’t need them because my setup is so simple. Top row of knobs is all MW, next one down is all BC, green buttons all track mutes, faders all track levels, and the encoder’s rotary function is AT. Like I mentioned though literally everything is subject to change. I bought my EC4 with a very specific setup in mind and I just knew it would work. It would have too but my preconceived notions of what would be most useful were simply wrong. After some experimentation I found ways of setting it up that really broke the Blackbox wide open for my usage. I’m looking forward to arriving at a similar feeling with MX12.
And thanks once again to @Humanprogram for pointing me toward that Oscillator Sink video. It wasn’t difficult to grasp what you were describing in regards to using the pushbuttons to activate ‘scenes’ but watching a guy do it and hearing the result always helps put things in clearer perspective. He also hipped me to the idea of turning up the macro setting to maximum to properly hear what the things one is assigning to said macro are doing. Seems dum dum simple now that I’ve witnessed it but I might have futzed around for who knows how long varying the levels of the assigned parameters while simultaneously varying the level of the macro itself. Not a fate worse than death but pretty inefficient use of time.
