MIDI event controller behaving badly with Axe FX II

Nigel,

In my personal opinion, this is a bug. I ran an experiment last night and set up a project to recreate the octave-shifting sequence from Muse's Map of the Problematique. This can be done by shifting a whammy effect between -1 octave and +1 octave in a specific 16th note pattern @ 125 BPM. I set up a MIDI track in Logic to control the whammy effect in my Axe using control change commands. Here's the event list:

As you can see, it's basically opening and closing a virtual whammy pedal. Here's the MIDI Draw screenshot so the sequence is easier to see:

But according to MIDI Monitor, Logic is spitting out gibberish while trying to keep up with the sequence:

In fact, my Axe Fx eventually gave up and stopped responding to MIDI commands! I had to restart it. So I think this is a bug. It shouldn't work this way. I guess I'll have to try Cubase. 😠

Jason

Interesting that the resulting sound was still ok in your experiment. In mine, it wasn't at all. It did not sound like the whammy was shifting between +1 and -1 octave. Instead, it sounded like a bunch of random noise. And I know that the Axe ordinarily can keep up with normal cc changes at this tempo because I can control the whammy with a physical hardware expression pedal and it works fine. The expression pedal is also sweeping cc values between 0 and 127 in real time.

Yes, I tried it without MIDI Monitor running and got the same result -- random noise. All my drivers are up to date, as far as I'm aware. The Axe is plugged into my Mac over USB; I'm not using a separate MIDI interface.

I will try to run the experiment with another DAW and see if the result is any different.

Again, much appreciated.

In the meantime, I think I might have a workaround. The Axe can be set up to change scenes using program change messages instead of cc changes, using custom MIDI mapping. Ordinarily, PC messages just change the patch (each patch can have up to 8 scenes). I'm going to map program changes 120-127 to scenes 1-8 in the patch for the song I'm working on and see if that works. It should, as I think program changes are discrete, unlike cc changes.

Success! The program change method worked. Kudos to Fractal for including that feature. I will still try a different DAW to see if it behaves differently using the cc change method.

Nigel,

Just to close the loop, I tried this with Logic 9 and it is indeed a LPX issue. Here's the same test with LP9:

As you can see, LP9 does not attempt to fill in the missing controller values.

Jason

More evidence to send to the developers. Here's how LP9 is handling the events:

And here is what LPX is doing. You can see that it's filling in data between the events I've created.

No problem, I'll do that. 🙂