🧵 #MIDI madness for controlling #Guitarix #Looper from my #Akai #LPD8…

The Akai's touch buttons / drum pads can send Note, CC or Program Change. #Carla needs MIDI CC to control plugins, #gxLiveLooper needs one-shot messages for erasing tracks, yet it needs something on-off for recording. Basically: “hold the rec button” – but how, I need my hands to play, so I need to toggle that.

Solution: Set Akai controller to note mode. Split the “keyboard” so that the upper 4 keys/drum pads get passed on straight in channel 9, and the lower 4 run in channel 10, to which MIDI Note Toggle reacts. Then convert anything note to CC using MIDI Note to CC.

Let's see of this works in a little jam…

Note that I do not intend to do a timed looping performance like these many YouTube artists overdoing Ableton Live, I need drone sounds from bass guitar to be fed into #AudioDamage #Descent #GranularDelay, so timing is not that relevant.

@tm @falktx @x42

#LinuxAudio #LinuxProAudio #LinuxMusician

@tm

I am actually a post-zynthian person. But that was some years ago…

… after some interesting crashes of VCV rack I might as well just do voodoo to get #GxLooper midi-controlled for my crazy ideas.

It turns out, that while @falktx created a pretty sturdy plugin host with Carla, @x42 has given us some neat MIDI tweaking plugins. These might actually manage to translate from my #Akai #LPD8 to what #Guitarix #Looper needs.

🧵 Still amazed by this granular delay plugin, AudioDamage AD061 Descent.

I had tried a setup that resembles my #Soma #Cosmos effect engine in the preceding toot. However, the #Guitarix looper is kinda difficult for me. So I remembered there is a quite crazy #looper for #vcvRack. Thus I tried to re-implement the entire #Carla-based setup in #VCV.

It is very easy to use MIDI controllers in VCV. (Guitarix looper was horrible for that.)

It sort of worked. What's difficult perhaps for many people, the routing and controlling, is easy for me as a nerd. VCV has plenty of interesting modules to do whatever to your audio signals.

Yet what it really doesn't have that much is decent equalizers, or a working noise gate. So it's time for rack as a VST host again. And… it doesn't really like to run multi-threaded on my system. My PC is an Xeon with weak single core performance, but using all its 16 CPU cores, it is a beast… mh.

Unsure which route to follow. Plus, the looper in VCV is somewhat idiosyncratic, too.