Using my MC6 Pro foot-controller, I want to access a few presets of Fabfilter’s Volcano to modulate an OB-E synth patch. Volcano’s presets use both bank and presets number—for example one is 3/88, so bank 3, preset 88.
I’ve been reading around here and elsewhere about CC0 and CC32 to access banks and presets, tried a bunch of things here in GP and on the MC6, but couldn’t get things to work.
On the GP side of things, how should I go about it? From what I understand, it’s not about using widgets given the nature of those 2 CCs. I read about MIDI in the manual and came across a section about adding a MIDI Out block and saw that this block’s menu offers things like a PC selection, “bank select” (with MSB and LSD) and a few more things. Since Volcano has a red MIDI pin, I added that block and connected the two. From the MIDI Out block’s menu, I added from the options the “Morningstar Mc6 Pro port 1”.
Is that the way to go about it ? And if not, what is ? One thing I also wonder is what should be done on the Morningstar MC6 side of things. I’ll bring this issue up in their forum and see what support I can get there.
Send MIDI from your controller to the plugin via connected pins. Use the MIDI Input that corresponds to your device (MC6) under “Internal Plugins.” Put a MIDI monitor in between to check the messages you’re sending. That’d be it.
I think if you connect them like that that GP5 is not going to have a problem with those CCs but if you search around you’ll find you have to be very careful with those particular CCs in the GP enviroment.
If so, how do I use it exactly ? In the “bank select”, what values do I have to enter in the MSB and LSB boxes for a Volcano preset that has the number 88 in bank number 3 ? And what about the PC# ? Should I leave it at 1 ?
Note, this mock up MIDI port (left) takes MIDI from your MC6 into the rackspace. The other (right) sends MIDI from the rackspace to your MC6. Understand the difference. The image you posted shows the latter. That’s great if you need to send MIDI to the MC6, but you don’t need to send it there – you need to send MIDI to the rackspace and into Volcano.
Take a moment to familiarize yourself with GP terminology.
Make sure you have enabled reception of PCs from your MC6 in the global MIDI settings and adjusted the “only accept program changes …” setting appropriately for your use case.
I don’t use FF plugins so I’m not familiar with exactly how they work. But, this is how I’d program the command you requested on the MC6 if I were targetting a device that responds to bank/pc selection messages. Send three MIDI messages in sequence:
CC#000 [value 000] for Banks 0-127 use 000, for Banks 128-255 = 001, for Banks 256-383 use 002, etc.
CC#032 [value 003] i.e. Bank 0 = 000, Bank 1 = 001, Bank 2 = 002, Bank 3 = 003 (actually the 4th bank)…etc.
PC#088
And then try some other bank and preset combos to ensure you’ve got it all right. I’m assuming zero-based everything.
I managed to have it work. It turns out that using CC#32 and the PC# of the presets in the Morningstar was enough, with using a MIDI In block wired to Volcano in GP5. Thanks again for your support.
Now, to the next piece of this puzzle of a setup of mine… I’ve used hardware loopers for quite some time and I want to see if I can integrate a digital one in this setup. I browsed around, a few come up, mainly SooperLooper, Enso and Mobius. The catch is that, for all I see, there isn’t much detailed information on how to integrate them with GP and the Morningstar. In any case, so far Mobius seems to most promising, but let’s see how this part unfolds.
