Ultrabeat, or other step sequencer with Hardware Controller?

hi, may i suggest:


http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/TriggerFinger-main.html

it's great if you feel like tapping out a drum pattern. you can also use the pads to mute sounds or even to trigger patterns!

it's a great little controller with a few knobs and sliders for extra tweakiness 😉

monome seems to be a hot new product:

http://monome.org/media/monome40h.mov

both of these should do the trick 😀


for a more 'classic' step sequencing thingy, check out the MAQ 16/3

http://www.doepfer.de/home_e.htm

If you mean you want a MIDI hardware controller to actually change the Ultrabeat step sequencer directly, well, it's a little tricky. It is possible to automate the adding/removing of events from the UB step sequencer. Using my 01X I scrolled through the many screens of controls (165!). At the end, after voice 25's envelope, there are controls called Trigger, Vel, Gate and Accent. By twiddling the knobs on the O1X and recording the automation data, I noticed these effect the UB step sequencer. So, you can start the UB step sequencer running and change it on the fly. It's a bit difficult with my O1X as there are only 8 knobs, so I get to change 8 steps at a time. It also only changes the currently selected voice.

In theory you should be able to either use the "Learn Assignment" or the Environment to map a MIDI controller to these UB meta faders. However, I can't get Learn Assigment to work. In the Environment I tried creating a Transformer which maps, say MIDI CC#70 to the UB meta fader. But the values are too big! I recorded some O1X knob twiddles for the Trigger and in Automation Event Editor it shows the event values as:

Status Ch Num Val Length
Fader 2 <322 1 Trigger

322 being too big for the Transfomer object - it only accepts 0-127.

So, if you wanted a MIDI box full of buttons, like the Monome or x0x drum machine to control these Trigger values, I'm not sure how you'd do it.

May be there's a way of mapping to values outside the 0-127 range. Anyone know?

<rant>
actually this is my gripe with Logic's instruments - they're not setup to accept MIDI CC's, like the filter cutoff on the ES1/ES2 etc should be mapped to CC#74 or whatever and they all should be consistent - UB should be the same, maybe the Novation Remote 25 SL but I haven't seen one
</rant>

Or there are environments like the USS and SQ16 knocking around which may be easier to modify for hardware control.

You might also want to try out Wilhelm from http://www.stretta.com/~matthew/resources/wilhelm/index.html

That monome has to be the coolest thing I've ever seen. I NEED one of those, like NOW. I wonder if it would work with Logic out of the box? Anyone using one yet? $500 does seem a bit steep though.