Hey, I was looking for a flexible way to control the Bitwig clip launcher from my foot while playing instruments at the same time. I got myself the MC8 Pro as a birthday gift but have yet to configure it.
I was wondering if anyone has some mapping done already. I saw a YT video showing how the user was controlling the Ableton Live launcher with the MC8, and this looks quite similar to Bitwig Studio. The thing I need to know is whether I have to come up with my own way from scratch (choosing MIDI PC, CC, etc triggers, configure the stomp buttons and actions in the MC8 and mapping them manually to Bitwig via its MIDI learn feature) or if there is a less tedious way to go about it.
Ideally, someone has done that before for Bitwig but any inspiration is welcome.
Hi! Congrats on the new MC8 PRO and thank you for your purchase. Happy birthday!
If you want a customized control layout, your DAW will always require you to map desired controls to the switches you want. The only difference with the MC8 PRO is that you need to program each switch to send a unique CC message with value 127 (127 is usually on and 0 is off) when pressed.
You can then map your switches accordingly to the controls on your DAW. If you’d like to use different actions like Long Press, Release or Double Tap for other controls too, just add another unique CC message that gets triggered by your desired secondary action. Do note that a Long Press will also trigger Press, so you’ll need to use Release instead of Press if you’d like to use Long Press as a secondary function as well. We explain the Actions execution sequence here.
Thanks! That’s what I thought, so I have to carefully prepare and layout the MC8 Pro config as I wish. I just thought that someone would have had a config or template for this kind of DAW control as most DAWs with clip launching have pretty much the same design. But that’s OK, it’s worth the time thinking ahead about what I want to do with the buttons.
Thanks for the tip about long presses, I will need it for sure. I also found that Bitwig has some scripting options and some German guy (Mossgraber I think) made it easy to add controllers to Bitwig with a generic flexible config that can map you controller messages to any function in Bitwig.
Question: can the MC8 Pro receive feedback from the DAW or device it is controlling ?
Yes, the MC8 PRO can receive and respond to incoming MIDI. The MIDI implementation chart for each of our products can be found in their respective manuals. Here is the MC8 PRO’s.
@benjamin During the week-end, I started to configure my MC8 pro according to what feels convenient / comfortable to deal with in a live situation. I am really impressed by the flexibility of the controller’s config. I am almost done with my first iteration and it works already really nicely. There are a few things I think could bring it further (maybe it’s because I am still a little ignorant of the MC8 capabilities):
a dedicated shift button would be nice to have (apart from the 8 switches already present) to (un)toggle shift mode for presets that are configured with shift messages. Or maybe if I trigger certain presets, I can add an extra message to activate the shift mode of some presets ? (and I guess ‘shift’ is not a global mode but a per preset mode, correct ?). My usecase is as follows:
I have switch presets that trigger scrolling up and down my clip launcher scenes and a play button for the entire scene that is selected. But I also have switches that navigate tracks and I would like in this case that the play button plays the selected clip on the track. I can make the track navigation presets activate the shift mode of the scene navigation presets which would then transform into clip navigation (the clip launcher view in Bitwig, as in Ableton Live is usually showing tracks as vertical container of clips and scenes as rows of clips across the track columns). Triggering a single clip or a whole scene needs a dedicated command or CC message from the MC8. So a switch preset for vertical navigation could either activate a whole scene or a clip depending on the context.
So the navigation switch for scenes can easily be shifted for clip navigation within a track once I navigate through tracks, but how do I come back (unshift) to scene navigation without sacrificing a switch button to unshift the navigation context ? Of course, I can configure a different page which solely focus on whole scene context while another page is focused on clip context. But wouldn’t it be nice to flip contexts via the shift / unshift mode in some discreet way ?
Yes, it sounds like it would be better if you use Release and Long Press OR Press and Double Tap on one switch. This way you get one switch to function differently depending on the action you perform on it. By definition, Shift is only temporary.
I actually managed to make it perform the way I want with the long press
As to the shift mode, I understand it is a temp mode, but at the same time, I could see in the ‘set_toggle’ options, that there is a ‘shift hold’ option. I ended up making use of it and that really made my config work the way I wanted. Thanks so far for the feedback, really appreciate!
