cycle between patches

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Level 1

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cycle between patches

So this might be an obvious question, but I can't tell. I have mainstage set up to where I have a set for each song. I'm also using mainstage as a guitar rig, so each set has 2 patches in it, one for clean guitar, and one for distorted guitar. Then those patches are going through an aux channel with all of my effects. Each set also has a playback set up with backing tracks for that song. The problem I'm having is I'm using an FCB1010 foot controller to trigger the playback, as well as switch in between the patches. I will sometimes accidentally press patch up instead of patch down on the foot controller, and instead of cycling between the two patches in the set, it will go to the patch in the set above. This will immediately stop the playback and ruin the song. This has turned into a huge problem for me, and I'm wondering if there's any way to set it up so if I press patch up instead of patch down, instead of going up to the patch in the next set, it will just cycle between the two in the set I'm in. Anybody know how I can do this? Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

MainStage, Mac OS X (10.6.7)

Posted on Jul 25, 2011 5:03 PM

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Answer 1

dhjdhj

Level 2

174 points

Jul 25, 2011 9:05 PM in response to alexwnbrg

I can't think of any clean way to do this within MainStage alone. You would really need to intercept incoming program changes, perform arithmetic to determine what to do with an incoming program change value and then send the appropriate program change into MainStage. For example, since you always have two items, assuming they're at locations (1,2), (3,4),....(2n-1, 2n), and you send in a patch up command, the processor could look at the current program number and if even, go down one, otherwise go up one.

It would be trivial to implement this with something like Max/MSP but unfortunately that's an expensive solution. I'm not sure if the free MidiPipe tool has enough functionality to do this but it might be worth checking.

The cynical side of me suggests more practice so you simply don't make the mistake (grin)

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