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Topic: What cool things do you do with your midi controller? - Page: 1

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Hey guys so i thought it'd be a fun idea to hear what you guys do with your midi controllers. This includes modding as well as mapping. Do you guys stack any effects in particular on knobs or buttons? anyone have any cool pitch tricks or just any fun ideas that they've mapped on there midi controllers? I've really got into mapping lately and have a few devices im working on. I was also very intrigued by some of the effects used my touring artist i noticed when i went to shambhala skrillex and bassnectar were both using m audio trigger fingers. I dont know if thats because thats what the festival provided but never the less skrillex used an effect on a drop in a song which made it sound crazy without distorting the whole tune. I'm looking to find those nice setting. Do you guys have any effects you favour in particular? i tried one of the new gate effects and was fairly pleased!
 
Posted Sat 13 Oct 12 @ 4:54 pm
So one of my ideas is to set up my touch pad and or. The ballknob that's on my novation remote sl37. It would be cool if the touch pad would act like a jog wheel. Where you could touch it to stop the song then pull back or pushforward for a scratch like motion. Also the ball knob above the touch pad couldn't that also do something similair and if it can could I maybe stack some cool effects on it? Maybe the gate effect on one of the knobs axis and a low pass filter or high pass filter on the opposite axis?
 
wrote the same thing twice :s
 
well the novation remote actually has a touch pad could that be used for scratching with maybe the joystick being a crossfader on the y axis and on the x axis or as you mentioned multiple axis have effects set? the thing about this ball knob is its not setup like your diagram it sits in the middle but its bottomed out so its not in the very center but bottom middle and has the ability to move up and to the left and or right. thanks for the script im definetly going to try it out for fun. I\\\'ve figured out mapping a little more not much to be honest but I\\\'ve been working on understanding it and am now setting up my novation as a two deck controller it has many buttons which allows for a lot of options. Where\\\'s all the other vdj users with some bad ass ideas?
Thanks again synthetic you always got some ideas!
P.s. I was trying to pick apart my hercules 4-mx controllers actions then realized the mapping was chopped in half because they used some sort of mirroring or something :s anyway i can view the hercules 4-mxs mapping and device files? i found controllers on the download section but had no device file.
Keep the ideas coming guys
and remember i workign with the novation remote sl 37 which ive posted a pic of in here if it works succesfully so any ideas you can think of let me know. I\\\'d like to create multi layering if i can eventually.
 
so i tried applying the x axis code into vdj but got a syntax error which means something isnt working right.
 
still a no go but im trying it in the simple midi wrapper so that could be the problem ? I'm still figuring out the device config for my novation remote so just using simple midi wrapper to build the mapping.
 
Haha well its working now which is awesome! I'm still going to have to try it out which i intend to do in a few here. any idea on how to make the touch pad under neath the knob a scratch pad? Also is it possible to specify what decks the crossfader works with? yesterday i was playing around with both my controller hercules 4-mx deck 1 and 2 and novation remote deck 3 and 4 but i couldn't use the crossfader because it faded between 1,3 and decks 2,4 and last but not least looping knob? i tried to find the mapping for my knob that does it on my hercules 4-mx but it wasn't showing.
 
I'm surprised no one else has anything cool to mention?
 
tried it out and it worked pretty well besides the fact that the knob doesnt sit exactly in the center which ill have to fix. Anymore effects that i can download like that? you can send me a private message if its not ok for forums and you dont mind sharing.
 
Here's one I use,
With Traktor you can grad loops on the fly without having to actually loop the track. I love that feature, so with some VDJ script magic I can now do the same thing. Here's how,

I have the buttons mapped on my djc4 like this, Down ? Deck 1 loop & sampler 1 rec & sampler 1 play : deck 1 loop

I'm doing this from memory but I think that's it, lol!!
 
thanks man! I'm definitely going to give it a try and if you got anymore please share! i mapped my slider knob to slider 1 and two for some cool effects! though its fun, im still looking for new and innovative ways to use it. ive mapped most of a mixer layout on it such as pitch sliders and volume slider as well as eq knobs for both deck 3 and 4. I've also been tampering with smaller and smaller decimals for looping for some possibly cool effects on the piano keys. im trying to get the screens to work using chackls scripting but its not working at the moment. if i can get it to work id like to use it to browse effects and or songs which would be an amazing feature!
 

Heres what I got on 1 fader,

param_smaller 10% ? video_fx_clear : param_smaller 20% ? video_fx_select "Titler" & video_fx on : video_fx_select "Titler" & video_fx off & param_smaller 30% ? video_fx_select "PandoraBox" & video_fx on : video_fx_select "PandoraBox" & video_fx off & param_smaller 40% ? video_fx_select "Backdrop" & video_fx on : video_fx_select "Backdrop" & video_fx off & param_smaller 50% ? video_fx_select "Negative" & video_fx on : video_fx_select "Negative" & video_fx off & param_smaller 60% ? video_fx_select "Syz_ScrollingStrip" & video_fx on : video_fx_select "Syz_ScrollingStrip" & video_fx off & param_smaller 80% ? video_fx_select "VideoCube" & video_fx on : video_fx_select "VideoCube" & video_fx off

Got carried away but hey VDJ script is the shiiiiii!!
 
to fix the joystick use this on the x axis

param_equal 0% ? effect 'trans' active off : effect 'trans' active on & effect 'trans' slider 1

you need to be more specific with what you want.. I have done pretty much anything worth trying that I could think of to my midi controllers.

One other cool thing I tried on a piano keyboard was using 2 octaves of keys to play hot cues.. but the trick was that you would make a track in a DAW of just a synth noise eg a dirty dubstep style lead bass line that started at C2 then rose to C5 with a duration of 32 beats each note. then I mapped a button to set all of the cues at the same time.

I took it another step further by using Phantom's watchdog plugin to query the opposite decks key and change the number of hot cue the keys play. With a little more tinkering I made it so from the C key just using the white keys you would be playing in whatever minor key the other decks song was.

Then to go to the next extreme I made the knobs control various effects and Huey introduced me to a really tasty LFO filter that has a really nice resonance and distortion built in. The idea was to have a synth you could play to live remix tracks that had unlimited soundbanks. It worked great but I broke the connection of my mpk mini and I didn't like the way the pads LED's worked as I didn't have full control of them.
 
Haha, I love that LFO! Still use it too.

Been looking at that Novation controller and I think I might get the version without the keyboard. The unit looks good.
 
I was out playing last night and that script I posted earlier won't work right, if you try to grab a sample while both decks are playing it'll play the previous sample. You have to have it select the deck.

Here's the proper script,

Down ? Deck 1 select & Deck 1 loop & sampler 1 rec & sampler 1 play & sampler 1 beatlock : deck 1 loop

I use timecodes so I turn beatlock off or else it does funky things with the samples, you can remove it if you want beatlock on.
 
ya sorry I'll try to be more specific but its hard when you know the bear minimum. I really appreciate your guys' answers though and will be trying out all these scripts. I dont do much video mixing though i tried it the other day and it was pretty fun. im thinking of learning ableton and running my novation remote and korg padkontrol. hey beatbreak if you do buy the unit be very careful the buttons underneath the knobs are rubber and sometimes get stuck underneath the pianos plastic top cover i was actually thinking of taking the buttons out and putting legit ones in. I was using a gate echo and its a great effect but my program was lagging out because of it but id like maybe a crusher granular mix so i might try that out (synthetic). your changing key idea is way to insane for me im going to read that over a few times and figure out if i can get it to work. it sounds like your mixing style is sort of like mine, you use vdj for live instrument play. ok so this is the effect i wanted to recreate i saw skrillex live at shambhala in 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEhasYA6nVk this is the link and the sound/effect id like to create is between 46 seconds and 48 seconds. if i could write out the sound that i want you to here it would sound like do do do do blaoooop. Sorry i know that seems really ridiculous but if you dont know the song he's playing you might not catch the part that he changed. when he changed the song it should have only went do do do do do do do no blaooop sound is in the original song. i think he's maybe using some sort of granular from ableton?
 
I don't know how to make that sound unfortunately, it was a little to 8 bit sounding for anything I have heard or done with VDJ or fruity loops...

If you want to use a granulizer to try and make it I highly recommend dblue's one "It's the guy that makes glitch" also the tapestop and crusher are awesome...

The other possibility could be chackl's rollit as you can do a loop roll but change the pitch of the recorded sample at the same time, again not really sure how to degrade the sound to 8 bit although maybe something like "auto tune" could do it as it works for that terrible cher style vocal that every pop song had a couple of years ago... And autotune is skrillex's bread and butter when he sings on his tracks...

I refuse to link cher so here is Will Farrell and Danny McBride doing it ;-)
 
haha dude! thank you that was awesome im a huge will ferrell fan too. do you know anywhere where i could find an auto tune? im going to look for that blue glitch plugin but ive been playing around with random plugins and its been shutting down my system so my computer might not be strong enough for it. anyone have any clues how to make your system run more friendly with vdj when handling new plugins? i got a new hardrive its an sd and its quick as lightning but something else is going hay wire. i removed all the new effects for now but still get latency and lag problems with some of vdjs effects that come with the program. mostly gate echo and the efx 1000 effect though it was working fairly well last night at the house party i dj'd also put beatbox and the djm 750 filter to use as well as a good echo doppler. my buddies speakers were so crappy though that i had to run the sound through a headphone jack into his sound system and it still sounded terrible had to run my lows high and my highs slightly low lol ut everyone enjoyed it and it worked out well. I was using my hercules 4-mx for this mixing. so does anyone know if crossfaders can be set for certain decks? i really want 1 for deck 1 and 2 and another for deck 3 and 4 as im runnning to controllers and they share the same crossfader right now. also with working with my novation id like to have a slider as a gate echo and the other two as similair effect sliders then leave the top 8 encoders as sliders 1-4 for deck 3 and 5-8 as deck 4 sliders so if im using the mouse or maybe set up a effect browser button on my controller ill have generic knobs and buttons for effects. (hopefully not making this to confusing) i might make it so that the top 8 encoders are deck 3 effect sliders and the buttons underneath effect buttons 1-8 (eeerr...make that 9) then use the var sample code you shared with me to set it as deck 4 as well (set a shift key) then set half the piano keys to set cue the other half to go to cue and set them up on the mapping for a varshift as well.
 
also how could i set the ball knob sliders to be for deck 3 and 4?
 
actually ive got a different idea for the ball knob. could i use a button to jump to the effect browser and use the ball knob to browse? maybe a button for searching music and browsing for that to?
 
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