Map a tempo dial to two CC dials?

Question

MIDI Target Manufacturer(s): Other/Unlisted Maker

The Singular Sound BeatBuddy has a MIDI tempo setting using CC 106 and CC 107 for tempo MSB and LSB respectively, and I’m struggling with creating a control for this. The tempo dial would go from 40 to 300, and set the CC values on two subcontrols according to the enclosed picture. I wonder if this, or some simplified version, is at all possible?

Images

Tempo to CC mapping

Comments

Off hand 106 and 107 sounds a lot like Bank Select (or maybe NRPN 7-bit? or 14-bit?)... have a look at both of those MIDI message types and see what they output. Both of them have an MSB and an LSB and combine them in a particular way which might correspond. Once things line up somewhat it’ll be a question of getting the right number of ticks and max and mins right. I did write up how to do a simple tempo knob with Ableton somewhere you can find on this QA site.

Let me know how you proceed, please. The LOG is your friend (but you knew that).

Thanks!

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No luck ... the BeatBuddy accepts a tempo only by sending a CC106 followed by a CC107 as in the table above, and I can not figure out how to get a 40-300 dial mapped to two CC dials in Mididesigner ... a supercontrol not limited to 0-127, with named ticks that operated on the subcontrols' tick row numbers rather than MIDI number would solve this nicely. That would allow free mapping of input values to output values, given the same number of ticks on the super and sub controls.

I'll ask the BeatBuddy folks if they can't implement setting the tempo using an NRPN message instead, that would be so much better than this dual CC implementation.

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1. A supercontrol can have more than 128 ticks if you use a type like NRPN 14-bit. 2. MIDI values are terribly awkward, but if you can dial in ANY numbers you can guess (or, better, calculate) your way to the right numbers for named ticks. I'm not clear on whether we can do this in MD for this situation yet. If not, we've got some more powerful solutions (e.g., Midi Fire).

Thanks!

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OK, I’ll look into MidiFire. I used to have MidiBridge but I think it stopped working with iOS11.

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You’ll get a discount on Midi Fire if you own Midi Bridge, I think. Also: we’ll have a feature that’s relevant to this ready for early beta testing in the next 5 weeks, so that could be another way to go. Thanks!

Also: You might be able to do this with Sequential subs... I kind of doubt it but remember that named ticks allow you to repeat values, so for this one knob, you might be able to kludge something together. Not clear and striaghtforward, but it could work.

Actually even without sequential subs this could work given that a supercontrol can have 16K named ticks and the subcontrols can have lots of repeated ticks.

Like I said, if you can nail any values, then it’s just a question of doing the hard work of dialing in all the values.

Thanks again.

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MidiFire and Pitch Bend messages solved the problem. I’m wondering about other 14 bit messages (other than NRPN which MidiFire can’t use as input); the only two I have found in Mididesigner are Pitch Bend and Song Position. However, according to the MIDI specification CCs 1, 2 and 4..7 can be paired with CCs 21, 22 and 24..27 for 14 bit messages. They are not used that way in MD but maybe they could be?

EDIT: Didn’t think that through, I guess thes messages would be sent individually, so the same issue as NRPN in MidiFire.

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They are used in that way in MD. If you select a low number CC you will see the 14-bit CC toggle. Let me know if that makes any sense, please.

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Thank you!! I had completely missed that option. Mididesigner looks better and better the more I understand how powerful it is.

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I do wonder how many of our users use features like this, but it is MIDI. Would love to know if you find this useful!