garageCube

I am completely new to all this stuff. no knowledge on dj/vj thing + never had any midi device. well, till the day before yesterday.

I bought Korg nanoKontrol + Akai LPD8 on the day 2 (of my m8 experience) just because I felt I needed some controllers. After spending 1 whole day in figuring out what bus, channel, cc, notes are, I managed to map some knobs and sliders to those controllers.

and that stopped at 'SOME'.



1. which function do you guys map to controllers? I know the answer will depend on which feature I use the most but I don't really any at this point, since I just started. All I know is that I want 3-4 layers of movies (background, midfield, foreground, special pop-in) come and go. I have those 4 layers in group A only. (tbh, I don't know what adding group B can help with doing the above.) Anyways, any input would reduce amount of time wasted in trial/error.

2. I felt that I would need more buttons than knobs and sliders. would having a controller with a bunch of buttons, like apc20 (is it called launcher?), help me a lot? Switching between 'scene' or 'program' has been a challenging task for me. (and there were tasks that I wanted to do simultaneously across multiple layers, such as layer opacity)

Thanks in advance.

Jay

. welcome to vj'ing...

. 1 - i would recommend a lot of trial and error! after a while, i found i was using buttons to change clips, turn effects on/off, turn auto-color and auto-scale on off. ultimately, i started writing my own modules (120-.... in the public library) to do more 'interesting' things. - most people use A/B fade to set up the next 'scene' in b while a is playing, then transition over.

. 2 - buttons can be very useful - especially if you get into module programming. though, if you need 25 buttons in a low space profile, i'd suggest a korg nano key - and if you flip it to CC mode, you get another 25 buttons!

. since you know your layout (four layers - same layout i use) i think you'll find writing global modules to control each layer much nicer than having to remember to switch to the proper layer *then* make the effect change. it's not that hard when you get the hang of it and the forums are a great place to ask questions, etc.


. good luck!

-james
(a nomad. )

If you only need more buttons then knobs and faders you can still use the keyboard. I think there is no midi-controller with more only buttons for this price. You can get an external keyboard and map it to modul8.
For me it's a better handling with knobs and faders on a controller, but for buttons there is no reason for me to spent much money in a controller, the buttons are all there.

Thanks for the advices, guys!

I figured out some more things to map to controllers. random/sound in move and color! I probably have to return LPD8 for 60+ bucks and get one more of nanos, or use apple extended keyboard which I already have! (someone suggested this option in another thread)

I presume macbook wouldn't differentiate common keys of the two keyboards (e.g. a-z, 1-0, f1-f12)? Even if that's the case I still can map numeric keypad and mid section keys of the extended keyboard.