Novation Launchpad as Drum Controller?

[gatorcse]

Hi guys, first time poster here!

I've just setup a fresh install of ubuntu studio to start doing some digital music production, and I've hit a little snag. I have a midi keyboard plugged into my computer (NI Audio Kontrol 1) and midi inputs work just fine there, but I also have a Novation Launchpad I would like to use as a big drum controller. It is recognized as a midi device, and I can assign it in patchbay, sending it to Hydrogen. However, only some of the buttons correspond to the proper (drum) notes, and not all notes are covered. I can't seem to find a way to remap the notes or otherwise solve the problem. I've been googling this for a while and all the information I've found so far are about drivers that make it recognizeable as a midi device (which it already is out of the box), but not how to configure it. Is there a solution to this problem, or am I buying another midi drum controller?

[raboof]

Hi guys, first time poster here!

Welcome!

I've just setup a fresh install of ubuntu studio to start doing some digital music production, and I've hit a little snag. I have a midi keyboard plugged into my computer (NI Audio Kontrol 1) and midi inputs work just fine there, but I also have a Novation Launchpad I would like to use as a big drum controller.

That's a convenient setup

only some of the buttons correspond to the proper (drum) notes, and not all notes are covered. I can't seem to find a way to remap the notes or otherwise solve the problem. (..) Is there a solution to this problem, or am I buying another midi drum controller?

There are probably many ways to solve this problem. If you cannot configure the Launchpad to send out different MIDI signals, it'd probably be most convenient to have some program map Launchpad's output to what Hydrogen expects.

To find out what you want to map to what, you probably want to feed both your midi keyboard and the Launchpad into a MIDI monitor like KMidiMon.

There are probably various ways to map MIDI events. I would probably do it using PureData, but there's a bit of a learning curve involved. Watch the rest of this thread for more options . If you need some more help doing the mapping in PureData ask here (or in the PureData forums).

[Excds]

For remapping the midi events sent from the launchpad, you can use this: http://das.nasophon.de/mididings/

Also, if you want to try something else fun you can try this: http://www.geekasaurusrex.net/post/2010 ... encer.aspx

Although, it might be more fun if it's actually synced to the rest of your stuff. I did a modification of that step sequencer earlier, so it accepts midi sync. I can post the update of that somewhere when I get home.

[nightmorph]

Depending on your coding skills, you might be able to map the button presses to MIDI or OSC messages using liblaunchpad, which includes some basic programs to use for it. The author of this Linux driver also wrote some apps in ChucK for the LP. I'm very interested in using this device on Linux; you're possibly the second person I've seen that uses one. Be sure to let us know what you've got working!

On to Hydrogen: I've had a lot of problems getting Hydrogen to respond to my MPD18, but what I always end up doing is grabbing the individual instruments on the left side and just rearranging them from top to bottom, until they line up with the notes sent by each pad on my MPD18. Eventually I just quit using Hydrogen and switched to Renoise, since the Hydrogen way of assigning pads to notes is so frustrating and slow. Renoise is a lot easier to rearrange around your device, for your specific needs.

@Excds:

That mlr-like sequencer is interesting, but it seems to be designed just for Ableton Live, with MIDIYoke and Live's MIDI clock input. It definitely needs some rewriting before it would work on Linux. I'm very interested in your version! Would you mind putting it up on GitHub or Sourceforge or something?

[looplog]

The launchpad works as a native alsa midi device under later kernels and alsa builds. No need to compile drivers or any such thing. Any recent kernel should support it. I have two of them and they are great little controllers for triggering and sequencing. The midi implementation is basically fixed, but I use puredata to anyway so its no problem to convert the data to whatever is needed. The only thing about using them as a drum controller is that they are not velocity sensitive, so in that way not as expressive as something like the Akai MPD series.

[looplog]

Also, the sequencer @Excds linked to is great to use as a base for developing your own tools for the lpd. Once you dig around that pd patch you'll quickly see how to interact with the lpd leds and button presses. At least, it helped me a lot.

[nightmorph]

Well . . . it'll listen to velocity messages, but only to determine LED color. That's how the apps and userspace code I linked work. Does the updated mlr-like patch use more than one color to set/display info?

What kinds of changes were necessary to convert that mlr patch into something that's usable on Linux? Was it just a couple of fixes to connect to JACK and other native apps, or was it a more substantial rewrite?

[looplog]

Well . . . it'll listen to velocity messages, but only to determine LED color. That's how the apps and userspace code I linked work. Does the updated mlr-like patch use more than one color to set/display info?

What kinds of changes were necessary to convert that mlr patch into something that's usable on Linux? Was it just a couple of fixes to connect to JACK and other native apps, or was it a more substantial rewrite?

Can't recall about the colors. As for getting that patch going on Linux, from memory it works as is. You just have to start pd with two alsa ports and the midi triggers get sent out the second port, connect the lpd to the first port. I didn't really use it, just used it for ideas when making my own patches.