Lazylefteye Posted May 21, 2015 Share Posted May 21, 2015 I am trying to get my M-Audio EXP pedal to trigger a kick drum in Logic Pro X. I have found various things about using the Environment and inserting a Transformer but I have had no joy whatsoever. If anyone has done this I would love to know how. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazylefteye Posted May 27, 2015 Author Share Posted May 27, 2015 I can see in the Enviroment that the midi signal is being received from the pedal. I have tried inserting a Transformer, but I can't seem to get anywhere from here. Any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fleabag Posted May 29, 2015 Share Posted May 29, 2015 A normal drum trigger pedal would sense the impact from your foot and output a note-on event each time. A pedal that sensed how hard you hit it would set the note velocity accordingly, other pedals would just send a fixed velocity. Looks like the EX-P is a "continuous" MIDI controller, which will give you a range of data values from 0 to 127 according to the pedal position. Great for controlling volume or wah-wah, but a bit more tricky as a drum trigger. It might be OK for the occasional input of kick drum beats but I would not want to use it for regular drumming, it might knacker the pedal thumping your foot on it a lot! If you have the pedal plugged into the expression pedal input of a MIDI keyboard (or even the sustain pedal input if that input supports continuous controller pedals, I know one of my MIDI keyboards does and the other does not), you will probably be getting a range of controller 11 (expression) values from 0 to 127. Is that what you are seeing in the environment? You need to find an acceptable way to convert this data into note-on events. One possibility might be "When the controller 11 value rises above 64, send a note-on for a kick drum. When it falls below 64, send a note-off.". However, this might provide false triggers when the pedal is close to 64 - if your foot was rested on the pedal close to 64, then small changes in the output value from the pedal would cause unwanted extra kick drum hits to be triggered. Use of "hysteresis" would cure that, for example "When the controller 11 value rises above 70, send a note-on for a kick drum. When it falls below 60, send a note-off." - that change in range provides a dead-band which prevents false triggers. Logic X supports MIDI plugins (written in javascript) and it would be easy to write a plugin to implement the algorithm that I suggested above. There are several people using logicprohelp who write small plugins for free, including me, see the MIDI plugins forum. Hope this helps a bit. Fleabag Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazylefteye Posted May 29, 2015 Author Share Posted May 29, 2015 Thanks for the info, that has helped to make things a lot clearer. I am indeed getting values from 0-127. I'll have another try using your suggestions Much appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazylefteye Posted May 31, 2015 Author Share Posted May 31, 2015 Just wanted to say that thanks to some very useful advice from Fleabag I got this working a treat Thanks Fleabag, I appreciate your help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fleabag Posted May 31, 2015 Share Posted May 31, 2015 Just wanted to say that thanks to some very useful advice from Fleabag I got this working a treat Thanks Fleabag, I appreciate your help. Excellent, thanks! 8) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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