Sharing a Strymon Volante looper template for MC6 Pro

MIDI Control Strymon
1

tl;dr

I’m sharing a “Boss-style” looper preset for the Strymon Volante on the MC6 Pro

Link: mc6-pro-volante-looper-pp.json · GitHub

Why did you make this?

I have a Strymon Volante and the built in, tape-style “Sound on Sound” looper is cool.

However, I always found the controls confusing and unintuitive. I tried and failed to use it in a band situation, and never actually used it much on my own.

When I got my MC6 Pro, one of the first things I wanted to do was build what I think of as a “normal” (or “Boss-style”) looper. I modeled the controls off of the Boss RC-30.

How do I use it?

Start by tapping “Quit” (Switch E) which resets the state of the looper.

  • A: Record / Dub / Hold

    • After hitting “Quit” (E) — tapping this starts your loop
    • Tapping a second time sets the loop end-point, putting you in “[over]dub” mode.
    • Tapping again puts you in “hold” mode, meaning you can play as much as you want over the loop you’ve set.
    • After this point, tapping alternates between “dub” and “hold” modes, so you can record or just jam over what you’ve already recorded at will

  • B: Pause / Resume

    • Tapping this alternately pauses and resumes the loop.
    • This only functions correctly once the first loop has been set. After that point, you can pause/resume while either dubbing or holding

  • C: Status screen

    • This screen tells you what’s going on – e.g. is the loop being set, or are you dubbing/holding.
    • It’s not actually meant to be tapped on… (the RC-30 has only 2 switches!)
    • As a fun implementation detail, this is also how I was able to make switch “A” work the way I wanted :wink: Since there are actually 4 states needed for that switch (rec, set loop, hold, dub), but only three states available per preset (toggle on/off/shift)

  • D: Looper style

    • This one is fun – it switches between “SoS” and “Digital” style looper
    • In SoS mode, both the loop level and loop decay are set to about 75%. Over time, the loops you set will gradually fade away. This is a good option if you want to just endlessly jam and alternate rhythm and lead lines. You can tweak the decay to taste…
    • In Digital mode, loop level and decay are set to 100%, so you can just set a loop and play over it forever without any degrading
    • (Note that “Digital” is of course a digital emulation of an analog tape machine emulating a digital looper!)
    • Note that the screen here shows you the current state and tapping it will switch the state.

  • E: Quit

    • Very important - this resets the state of the looper!
    • Tap this before starting a new loop
    • Note that on the Volante (at least as far as I’m aware) there is no way to preserve the state of your loop, so once you tap this, your work is gone.

  • F: Home

    • This just goes to my “Home” bank… I think a lot of you follow this pattern.

Some musings on building this…

  • This was the first “real” thing I did with my MC6 Pro after getting it all hooked up. It was may more fun than I expected — I am hooked on MIDI now!
  • I have a few ideas of where to improve this from here… e.g. adding presets for more fine-grained control over loop level.
  • To be honest, I probably will not implement any feature requests, but do let me know what you think!
  • I am thinking of downsizing to an El Cap and look forward to doing the same work on there :slight_smile:

Feature request for Morningstar

  • It would be cool if there was a way to have more than 3 states per preset.
  • I realize that’s likely insanely complicated to implement / roll out to devices at this point…but it would make this project simpler :slight_smile:

A bug report?

I may have found one bug when making this:

  • I have my MC6 Pro set to “remember toggle states”
  • Everything works as intended while I am in the middle of a loop — I can switch to other screens and switch back, and everything is in the right state
  • However, when I hit “Quit (E)” and then come back, then my toggles are not in the state when I left them
  • I haven’t to reproduce this in depth, but I suspect that this is due to to having one preset (E) toggle multiple other presets (A/B/C) — and so for some reason, those states are not “preserved” as though I’ve actually tapped them myself?