After messing around with my own MIDI Fighter clone, I realized that although it had some very useful and expressive mappings for Traktor, its focus simply on the Drum Rack in Ableton Live is little bit… poor. That’s why I decided to create a little MIDI Script that would grant it some of the functionality that Launchpad or the APC has. More precisely Track, Clip, Device controls and of course keep the Drum Rack functionality.
For the purpose of developing and testing in hostile environments, where smuggling in a controller would be hard, I developed a simulation app in Processing, that would send the same MIDI values the MF Pro by simply using your computer keyboard. Also you can control the faders and knobs with the mouse. Simple, yet effective.
Download: github.com
Now back to the Script. It consist of 4 pages, somehow similar to the Modes on the Novation Launchpad.
Page 1: is the General control page and consists of tempo controls, global play, stop and record and the controls to move around the “red box”
Page 2: is the Track control page. Each row corresponds to one of the rows inside of the red box. And it consits of Track select, Mut, Arm and Solo.
Page 3: is the Clip control page, you have a 4×3 grid and the top row is the stop button for each track.
Page 4: is the drum rack pad. It plays the highlighted 4×4 grid in the drum rack.
Also the knobs and faders get automatically mapped to the first effect device of the selected track.
Here is a detailed diagram of all the controls:
Hopefully this script adds even more functionality to this great controller from DJ TechTools
Download: github.com or djtechtools.com
PS: thanks to gonecrazy3000 for pointing out that the preset buttons on the Beat Masher are arranged differently
so the pages would be like this:
preset button 1 =>page 3
preset button 2 =>page 1
preset button 3 =>page 4
preset button 4 =>page 2
Now go out, start a Fight and Loose. Peace!
this looks awesome! i’m trying to use with a beatmasher, and page one works, but the preset buttons don’t switch pages. does the launcher use different codes for these, and would i need to edit the remote script to get it to work? or maybe some other problem? thanks.
Do you have enabled the 4 Banks mode in the MF utility? It works like those Ableton Live packs from Mad Zach that have 4 banks of sounds. Let me know if you get it sorted out, I never actually tested it on a real MF Pro..
yes, it works, i needed to enable the 4 banks mode in the mf utility. now, i can use each of the 4 pages as you describe. i’m pretty new at mixing live in ableton, but i can’t wait to test it out with this. i was able to map one of my horizontal faders to the xfader, and use the vertical fader and my knob to control at least two of the effects. wasn’t sure if i could get my fader/knob to control macros in a effect rack, so you can choose which parameters to control, as opposed to just the first four parameters. thanks for your help.
Hi
Nice work ! I have a midifighter classic and I was wondering if I could use your script to have the red box in ableton ?
Thanks