The experiment with using the Minibrute as a MIDI Kontroller with the Control Freak and MidiOx remappings/patches has officially ended. Although the Minibrute’s MIDI spec listed CC122 as being recognised, I couldn’t get it to work. This means I couldn’t disable local control, and needed to turn down the master volume on the Minibrute to use as a controller.
I had a quick look around and the Korg Taktile 25 seemed to be a decent controller which would give me what i need. Sliders, pads, and keys… and an arpeggiator – the last time I had a play with one of those was an old MC-303 (back when it was a new MC-303). The interesting point about the arpeggiator here is that it will send it as MIDI notes. Quite possibly standard with many controllers but not something I’m familiar with.
Alot of the out-of-the-box focus of this unit is on plugging straight into a DAW using factory-configured control maps. The memory holds 16 scenes which contain the settings for the sliders, buttons, and pads and each can be set to a MIDI channel. As I’m not using a DAW at the frontend of my workflow I’ve set up a scene for each channel 11-16, which will be used for the synths. I’ll most likely go through 1-10 at some point for the Volca Sample.
The arpeggiator sends to the global MIDI channel regardless of which MIDI channel note and chord data is being sent to, and although I wasn’t initially impressed with that, it may actually be pretty cool – this way I could be controlling one synth and then fire the arpeggios off to another one without needing to switch channels. The most likely default recipient of this will be the Volca Bass, as it has fewer improv features built into the sequencer (case in point, the Nubass with its randomisation of accent, transpose and slide). I’ll go through the arpeggiator in a separate post as I really have no idea how to get the best of it right now.
Switching scenes is achieved by using the data entry tape slider which also has a + and – buttons at the ends. At first attempt it seemed clunky but after a little practice I find it more accurate than a traditional slider. With my previous controller keyboards I would have pushed some kind of mode button then a slider to change MIDI channel, with the Taktile I can just tap the + or – button (or use the ribbon slider if the distance between scenes merits it). Not only can I change MIDI channel this way, but the configuration of the controls changes also. This is important with the Volcas – if we compare CC assignments between the Bass and Nubass they both accept the CC range 40-49 but the parameters they control are in a different order. As I want to have the sliders performing approximately the same functions in different scenes I needed to alter the ordering.
Global control
All Scenes have pads 1-8 configured to pads 1-8 on the Volca Sample. Global channel set by default to channel 11 (volca bass) in order to send arpeggios there.
Need to define x-y pad, arpeggios, chords etc.
Transport, mixer controls not configured.
Volca Bass control
Sliders – Portamento, expression, gate time. LFO, EG.
Toggle buttons for VCO 1-3. Tunes in increments of One octave. E.g. button 1 OFF = VCO1 at -12n. ON = VCO1 at +/-0n. Button 2 = VCO1 at +/-0n (off) or +12n on).
Mod wheel – EG Int
Volca Nubass control
Sliders – LFO, EG, VTO, VCF attack/decay
Mod wheel – EG Int
VCF cutoff and peak not mapped
Volca Sample control
These are defined as one scene per channel (instrument)
Sliders – Level, Speed, Pitch EG, AMP EG, hi cut