I know that probably 3 billion people have used the MC products to interface with the Big Sky and Timeline. In all of my reading about the MC products with these pedals there are a few phrases that crop up.
“Program it however you want to”
“You’ll have to check the strymon manual for that.”
“In my opinion….blah blah blah” in reference to something technical that has no basis for opinion but only fact.
There are probably a million and one things someone might want to “do” with BigSky or Timeline. Most people want to “do” the same things with these pedals, yet there isn’t any clear advice or procedures to do so, mostly just some combination of the 3 statements above. I have heard of “utility banks” which is the framework I am working towards. I want to save sounds of which the two pedals mentioned are part of. If I dial in a tone on my Big Sky (but not save it to the BigSky as a program) how do I get the MC6 Pro to acknowledge this? Is it aware of the CC parameters? To me it makes sense that my Morningstar product is the brain that saves the “Presets” vs saving them in the actual pedals. Is this possible?
If not, how does one find the PC# that the Strymon preset is set to?
Sorry if I’m lame and too demanding for the new guy.
Hi. Being new to MIDI, this video we made will be helpful to you:
Contrary to what you mentioned, the best way to save and recall settings on a pedal is to save the preset on the pedal itself, and then recall it using a PC message from a MIDI controller. This is because your pedal has all the knobs you need to tweak your settings and dial in your perfect tone.
PC numbers run in sequence with the presets on your Strymon pedals from 0-127. We explained that in the video as well. Hope this helps!
Thank you. Saving presets on the pedals then recalling them with the MC6 is probably what most people do and I accepted that this may be what I have to do. I was wanting to turn the dials but then use GUI to do the saving. I’m very familiar with MIDI. The MC6 is amazing that you can essentially program it to do anything but I’m capable of believing that in reality most people basically want it to do the same things. The Timeline Looper functions are very well spelled out and easily reproducible so that saved a lot of time getting it set up. TBH I was wanting to avoid having to get into creating nomenclature and bank standards to use across my differing pedals (BigSky, Timeline, M1, ACS1) to simplify the organization and implementation of pulling up presets. Having to remember names like “Sawtooth Orca” = Cloudverb 80%wet with a Harmonic Trem on the Perfect 5th and a dotted 8th delay with 13 repeats is a daunting task. This becomes even more complicated when having to use the various pedals (some without LCDs) to name them all “Sawtooth Orca” and then the toggled name for 10% more “Sawtooth Orca Encounters Poseidon’s Nemesis: Silence”
I’m joking of course, but naming conventions across pedals is complicated unless it is song specific. Hence the reason for wanting to use the Morningstar editor for this function. The GUI easily allows one to set things up.
I’ve had some success doing what you’re saying by dialling up a sound and then saving to an Iridium. Basically I used the mc6 to send a long press to the iridium. Then I was trying to choose a pc # with either expression or scrolling up/down and send via mc6. I’ll see if I can dig up the bank settings.
Sending the big sky in/out of freeze is pretty easy.
I decided I had to jump into Strymon nixie in order to use their GUI as a management tool, but I’ve come upon the dreaded yet fairly unclear solution to getting Nixie to detect the pedals using the MC6Pro
I discovered that Nixie will allow you to design sounds and save them via the GUI. This makes it a lot more palatable. I hadn’t known this because I am using the MC6Pro as my midi interface into my Mac computer. Prior to purchasing this I had no way to interface and therefore did not use Nixie. Now I’m working on getting Nixie to recognize my Timeline.
There are two things you are likely to want to do with MIDI pedals. One is programming the pedal and recalling the preset and the other is manipulating the pedals while playing.
Strymon Programming
By far the easiest way to programme and name specific presets is through Nixie. It works very well and there is a long rumoured beta that expand it’s capabilities to other MIDI based Strymon pedals. Nixie makes managing presets and assigning to specific programme numbers very easy to. You can then either assign the presets to the MC series or use the counters and ‘PC up and down’ (or might need to do bank change too, it’s a long time since I set it up) to just up and down the presets.
Manipulating Strymons
Programming Strymons to be controlled live through the MC series is as straight forward as any MIDI pedal. The back of the Strymon manuals show every parameter that you can control over MIDI. This can be selecting models of delay or changing the speed of a chorus etc. You just have to map the parameter you want to control to the MC6 switches or expression pedals.
I own all five Strymon flagship devices and use MIDI extensively across them to control them while playing. Just a few examples:
Timeline:
Regeneration and delay speed on two separate expression pedals
Map the looper functions to separate switches on a bank
Select different types of delay (while keeping other settings
Tap tempo
Lock to MIDIclock
Bigsky
one expression pedal - reverb length
one expression pedal - reverb mix
Mobius
one expression pedal - speed
one expression pedal - mix
MIDIclock lock
The above are in their own MC8 banks.
In my main menu bank I have one expression set to volume of Timeline and one for volume of Bigsky
Hope this is useful. I’ve added some photos of some screens on the different MC8 banks
My usage runs parallel to “Heymonkeyface’s” settings. I have 7 Strymon pedals, and because I hate bending over every time I want to make an adjustment, I had to devote two banks on my MC8 to the Timeline, Big Sky and Mobius. I managed to limit the Iridium, Deco and El Cap to one bank, but I’m using both pages of each bank. and rely heavily on the expression settings and an external expression pedal. There are some non-intuitive work arounds that several of the patient geniuses on this site helped me solve—but there is nothing—save all off on start up—that I haven’t been able to do. Just search Strymon forum of this site and loads of info will populate.
And “Heymonkeyface” thanks for sharing the screen shots!
And yet more screenshots. Most of these aren’t for Strymons but they give a flavour of different approaches for different pedals. I’m using a custom box to control four non MIDI pedals via a MIDI to expression. The banks labelled 'control are the two pages of the main menu. Each goes to it’s own bank. I use a separate 3 switch in one of the ports to select page 1/2, return to the main menu go to last used bank
I have a bunch of Strymon pedals and the one thing I still need physical access to them is long press on the button to save preset. I saw the button press CC in the list at the end of manuals, but couldn’t figure out how to turn that into a long press over MIDI from the MC6. Please do tell how you achieve that.
I haven’t spent that long trying to make this work, but had no success so far. It is on my list of stuff to figure out. Would appreciate any help with that as well. An example with one of the Big Sky factory settings would be fine.
I like to see the details of what Strymon collections look like. I’ll share mine: Compadre, Mobius, Timeline, Big Sky, all powered by a Zuma alongside a couple non-Strymon devices (Whammy DT and Korg Pitchblack Pro, the latter with a custom cable). The MC6 is also powered by the Zuma BTW.
Since I had to hunt down the details in the photos, I’ll write it down here: Mobius, Timeline, Big Sky, Volante, Nightsky.
You mention only 6 as far as I can see: Mobius, Timeline, Big Sky, Iridium, Deco, El Capistan. What’s the seventh?
Just had a quick look at the MIDI dictionary in the Morningstar editor. do you just assign “Footswitch press down” to a Press action, “Footswitch press up” to a Release action, and hold the Morningstar button like you would on the Strymon? For some reason I failed to find that earlier, and I think I was trying to come up with a way to do the long press as a single action.
As far as I can see, that wouldn’t work for Mobius, Timeline, or Big Sky. It’s the Type encoder you have to press and hold on these, not one of the footswitches.
At least it will work for the Compadre (Boost switch).
This is what I have down for Freeze. Not got everything switched on at the moment but you can see I have it as a click on click off in this scenario. I presume it works but I have a Freeze pedal and ended up using that for most of that kind of functionality. If you want it momentary then I guess you just have the second message as ‘on release’ and take the toggle off. I must revisit now I’m using the Big Sky more again
“Ola” is the non-midi black sheep of the family. I got such a great deal I gave myself permission to ignore its lack of midi. I am so dependent on my MC8 that I swapped my non-midi El Cap for the new midi-fied model and am glad I did. Admittedly there is “some”feature across a couple of the pedals, but when layering sounds for ambient guitar, I have a broader palette of options.
The best thing about the Morningstar controller—for me—is this forum! There is ‘t another like it When facing seemingly insurmountable techno-issues, there are so many ideas and people willing to share here.
I had the same settings in the press/release configuration you describe. I touched settings and reverted to that, on it started working. No clue what was wrong before, but at least I got it working now. Cheers.
Thanks guys! This is great information. I was able to finally get Nixie working with my MC6Pro and that is a complete game changer. I can just dial in presets from the GUI and rearrange them with ease, then I can consult the list of presets and pull them up with the MC software and make it all happen. When I get back from Cleveland I’m looking forward to working on my Morningstar. It completely changes the game.
I have a bunch of Strymon pedals and the one thing I still need physical access to them is long press on the button to save preset. I saw the button press CC in the list at the end of manuals, but couldn’t figure out how to turn that into a long press over MIDI from the MC6. Please do tell how you achieve that.
do you just assign “Footswitch press down” to a Press action, “Footswitch press up” to a Release action, and hold the Morningstar button like you would on the Strymon? For some reason I failed to find that earlier, and I think I was trying to come up with a way to do the long press as a single action. 
