Smart Knobs
Postby terracnosaur on Fri Apr 04, 2008 12:16 am
I use a Mac, don't have Reaktor, refuse to learn PureData (right now), or Processing, and wanted to use something like a smart knob. Here's my take on how to recreate a smart knob using general MIDI theory. Once I understood the concept of this, the implementation became really easy and I found lots of new tricks that became possible.
take a single hardware input that will generate a MIDI Continuous Control message (CC)
split that single CC into ranges using a MIDI processing app (I used MidiPipe)
set each range to send to another MIDI CC number
Either interpolate or scale the resulting MIDI CC messages so that you appear to have a few distinct cc's being generated by twisting that knob
A simple example. One knob into 2 consecutive knobs.
CC # 1 (Values 0-63) becomes CC #2 (Values 0-127)
CC # 1 (Values 64-127) becomes CC #3 (Values 0-127)
In your playback software or sequencer you set
CC #2 to control wet/dry mix of effect
CC #3 to control spicy value of effect
...Rinse and repeat for all your knobs & effects
If you want to get crazy, you can have many ranges that overlap and single values of the originating knob that generate note-on/note-off messages for things like reverse, gate on/off, or anything that can use a toggle.
