I’ve just cracked the code for the MC6 Pro after many months of working on the layout and setup of things to get my head straight about how I want to use it. Yesterday was the first day I got things properly functioning and I’m very excited to get deep into things.
For the sake of clarity, I’m using the MC6 Pro and the MidiBox. All pedals connect to the MidiBox.
Something I’m excite to use the MC6 Pro to do is capture and name more presets on my pedals that are a little impenetrable without external Midi control, ie: 2 x Chase Bliss pedals (Mood MKII and Onward), my Red Panda Tensor and the EAE Sending v2. These are all very deep pedals that can go so many strange places, but I’ve always struggled with the limitations inherent in the very finite preset recall without Midi. Now that I’ve got a tool to save a ton of presets, I’m eager to get to it.
I was able to do some preset creation and saving yesterday on all of the pedals, but I immediately came up against a workflow issue that was cumbersome. I know there’s got to be an elegant solution out there, but I don’t understand things well enough to suss out how to do it.
For the CB pedals and the Tensor, presets are saved by simultaneously pressing down the 2 buttons on the pedal and then sending that pedal a PC message with the slot # you’d like to use for the preset. I was able to do this successfully using the editor to create a “preset,” add in the PC number and then create the preset. However, it’s very slow going if I need to take the time to use the editor to “pre-create” the PC messages to send out to the pedals prior to creating presets. I work very hard to avoid technical work when I’m in the creative headspace, so stopping good workflow to set something like this up will be distracting. I feel like I’m missing a better solution. I did see some mention of using the counter to iteratively create and name presets, but it made zero sense to me. I’ve read up on counters and I think I’ve implemented them for creating an up/down preset scrolling process for each pedal, but I don’t get how to use them in the saving process.
Can some please explain how this sort of process might work? I would be very grateful.
Next, the EAE Sending v2 offers some different functionality for saving presets. In total, there are a possible 31 slots, total, for presets. The first 3 are very straightforward and accessible from the front panel and then I could use the same process as the CB and Red Panda pedals for saving, holding 2 buttons and then a PC message with the preset # you’d like to use. However, the pedal also allows the user to “…also save a preset by sending the desired PC number plus 64. For example, to execute a save to preset slot 4, you would send PC 68. This is easier for some controller setups.” Not having to hit the buttons of the pedal to save a preset would be great, but I’m not sure how to keep track of which slots have existing presets in a logical/fast workflow way. I’m also not sure how to setup this sort of PC message. It feels like it’ll be somewhat script-like, which isn’t my forte.
My apologies for the lengthy post. I’ve taken a very long time to finally get things straight enough in my head to get this working, so I’m rather eager to get it all working smoothly so I can get into more creative applications.
Thanks in advance.
Lee
