I’ve just bought the M-Vave Chocolate 4-button midi controller in order to change Songs / Parts live. I’d like to have Next Song on button B, Previous Song on button A, Next Part on button D and Previous Part on button C.
I’ve set up a test gig file with some dummy songs and the first hurdle I seem to be facing is that Gig Performer’s default setup is for each song in a gig file to have an incrementing program change number. Therefore each button on the M-Vave is selecting songs 1-4 rather than the setup I need.
Does anyone know how to change / remove this default behaviour so I get this controller to work the way I need?
If the controller didn’t come with an application to change the type of message being sent, then you’ll probably need something like Bome MIDI Translator to intercept and re-interpret the Program Change messages sent from the pedal before they reach GP. I have a few older controllers similar to yours, and Bome is what I use for them.
The controller does come with an app and there is the ability to change to a couple of other custom modes which I will check out. However, these modes restrict the controller to a single bank of 4 switches and I was hoping to utilise additional banks which are accessed by simultaneously pressing buttons A & B together or C & D together.
I know Bome is an extra expense, but it is well worth it. It covers translation issues between all hardware and software, so you probably won’t have to deal with issues like this ever again. Plus you get the benefit of adding virtual MIDI ports and routing options, so it’s quite valuable and versatile.
That’s the default but it’s trivial to change for each song part.
This is also covered directly in the documentation which can be found directly from the Help menu.
Many thanks for the reply. I had read the documentation on assigning program change numbers for song parts but hoped to avoid having to go in to each part in my existing gig files and changing manually.
I have managed to set up the controller now in a custom mode to do what I need but this restricts me to just the one bank of buttons. C’est la vie.
Ok, i understand the reluctance to do extra work but I’m unclear as to the alternative. If you want song parts to respond to specific program change numbers, how else could you do it other than manually?
Ah, apologies. All I was needing to do was have the 4 foot switches on this controller correspond to Next Song, Previous Song, Next Part and Previous Part. This I’ve now been able to do via a custom mode on the controller with unused PCs mapped to the widgets in my global rackspace.
The modes on the controller which have additional banks don’t allow you to change the PC values they’re sending out (buttons 1-4 are simply 0-3 PC values and the next bank up changes the buttons to 4-7 and so forth). I had wondered if GP’s default Song 1 = PC 0 etc could perhaps be overwritten or switched off so that I could specify PC 0 as ‘Previous Song’, PC 1 as ‘Next Song’, PC 2 as ‘Previous Part’ and PC 4 as ‘Next Part’. This would also then allow all the other banks on the controller to be used for PCs 5 to 127 which I could assign to other things I may have wanted as the need arose.
However, I now realise this can’t really be done simply and, as I say, have resorted to putting the controller into a custom mode which allows me to use the Next Song etc widget buttons mapped to PC 124 up to 127 (I’m never going to have anything near 124 songs in a set list so there would never be a 124th song for GP to select under that PC value). As previously mentioned this custom mode has no additional banks and restricts me to just the 4 buttons. But for my primary use case, this is fine.
Hope that makes sense and apologies for any confusion in what I was initially struggling with.
Forgive me if I am missing something (which is very likely)
But I continue to use my cheap legacy Casio CTK-7200 as a controller.
It has 3 buttons that send midi.
In the Global Midi Section I did MIDI Learn so I assigned buttons for prior song/next song/next song part (since I only have 3 buttons, I decided to do without prior song part.)
Anyway (again, missing something?), did you try that? Or (I suppose more likely) that does not work for?
If you want to use these additional banks for other actions (I assume you may want to turn widgets on/off?), you’re going to have the same issue in that they are only sending PC messages.
You don’t need Bomes, but instead can use a simple Gig Script that converts all incoming PC messages into a CC message, which you can then easily use for any purpose in GP.
