BigSky Banks/presets and ABC switches

MIDI Control Strymon
#1

Hi there,

I have just spent a couple of hours getting my Big Sky to work with the MC8. It seems to be finally working, but I think I need a tweak or 2.

On the bigsky there is a difference between scrolling through banks and presets. There is also a difference between ‘engage’ (on/off) and sending a message to emulate pressing one of the A/B/C buttons on the bigsky.

I have nearly got it working, but it’s not quite right.

On the MC8 I have buttons A, B, and C assigned to toggle buttons A, B, and C on the bigsky. This took a while to get it working reliably. I am sending a press and a release on the CC (e.g. button B is CC82) with values of 0 and 127.

I also have buttons E and F doing Bank up and Bank down using the ‘strymon bank’ feature. This also works.

However, if you press bank up or down the strymon display just stays on ‘Bank XX’ and you can’t see the preset name.

So, using advice from the forum I decided to use PC Number scroll with ‘increase and send’. This works very nicely allowing me to scroll up and down through the actual presets and see the names.

I then set up button D as engage/disengage using cc102 and toggle mode for the values. Works really well.

So I have a couple of remaining problems to work out:

  1. My banks are now out of sync with my presets. If I hit bank up or down I could be somewhere completely different than in the bank of the preset that is currently engaged. I suspect that this is a bit tricky to sync counters between devices. How can I fix it?

  2. How do I implement ‘freeze’? On the bigsky you press and hold either button A, B, or C. There is a CC function for ‘press/hold switch’ and I have tried to add that to my ‘engage’ button by adding a long press function and a long press release to turn it on and off, but it just engages/disengages and seems to ignore the long press.

Any help and guidance welcome!

1 Like
#2

Hi! For #1… scroll counters stay set until you change them, even when you change banks.

If you want to reset the scroll counter to either it’s starting value or a value of your choice when you enter a new bank you could program an ‘on enter’ bank message to Reset Only or Update Only on the scroll counter… Message Type List

#3

Thank you.

I will think about the bank settings and see if they will fix it.

I think there is a more basic problem here, which is the way that Strymon handles ‘banks’ versus ‘presets’. I think if I bank up I then need to send a button press which will activate the preset and probably get me back to where I want to be.

#4

I think that I’ve fixed it.

Each time I issue a bank up message to the strymon I also increase the counter on the PC scroll by 3 (that’s the number of presets in a bank).

I also need to hit one of the buttons to engage the preset in the bank. At the moment I’m just doing preset A from each bank to get it going.

So now I have preset scroll and bank up/down in sync with each other and the preset names show when it’s done it.

Success!

Can I suggest that we have a function that allows us to update the pc scroll number by more than 1 each time as I have had to put in 3 lines into the preset to increment the counter by 3.

2 Likes
#5

Final thought (maybe) for those people searching for the answer to this.

I realised that I don’t really need to bank up/bank down when using the morningstar. Bank up/down are needed when on the 3 button device and are just one way of navigating.

I can just use the PC scroll function and scroll up and down through the presets and never have to see the bank screen.

1 Like