The MidiBox Plan
Thought I’d sketch out how my Midibox will work and be laid out (currently).
As you read through you’ll be able to tell I’ve been thinking about this for ages and I think that the initial planning is crucial when designing a controller for yourself. I’ve been using an MPD24 in the short term to prototype out the Live layout to check that what I dreamt up actually works when you are in front of a crowd and this final controller layout is the end result of months of testing.
The basic Ableton Live document will comprise of 4 channels bussed to one ‘group’ channel for the drums and percussion and 4 channels for the musical elements. Each channel will have three pots (level, and two other functions TBC) and three buttons (‘channel on/off’, start clip and stop clip) on the controller. Both group channels will have a ‘channel on/off’ button and two knobs for functions TBC. The 5th knob will control the Q of all the filters in the layout.
The three buttons under the group section will control scene up/down and scene start so I can build the tune using individual clips but also launch entire scenes if I need to.
The end line of controls is set up to control the send effect, probably a delay (a dubstation probably) so it’ll be mapped to feedback, speed and highpass. The buttons below will be things like the Loop, Sync buttons on the dubstation.
The two groups of 12 buttons under each group is the fun stuff and is is applied individually to the drum and the music group.
The first 6 of each side will control beat repeat in Live. I have it set up (and working with my MPD24 and Midipipe at the moment) so each button does two things. The first is common to all 6 buttons and the is the ‘repeat’ button in the Beat Repeat plugin. The second function is to change the speed of the repeat. This allows me to ‘play’ the repeat in a more musical way rather than relying on the random functions to create variation.
These buttons also are linked to the synced speed of an AutoPan set up as a square wave tremolo with it’s on/off button set to one of the second group of 6 buttons. This allows me to chop off the second half of the repeats to create a much more stuttery effect. It also allows me to choose a speed of trem and just engage that without doing an actual repeat.
The remaining 5 buttons will enable a further 5 effects (either momentary or toggle depending). Including the Audio Buffer glitch plogue groups I’ve made available below and probably something along the lines of a flanger / phaser and a couple of Crazy Ivan settings I’ve knocked up that do some oddness.
All the buttons are illuminated and I will use the Midi Feedback functions in Live to enable things like clip playback status, effect on/off status and things like the Trem button will flash to let me know what speed it’s currently running at etc.
One final thing that isn’t on the layout is a ‘visual click’ which will be 6 LEDs on the box somewhere that will tick from one to the next on each beat providing me with a silent reference beat when all the delays, glitch and madness that will be going on throws my internal clock. The reason it’s six is it will cover most of the time signatures I can think of in a vaguely meaningful way.
In short, whilst I’d love a monome, the limitations of that controller are what made me decide to go for a custom controller. The thing I took from the monome is that visual feedback on the controller is paramount if you want to avoid the “Checking My Email” problem.