Toggle midi send on and off

[Thieson]

Hi Guys,

First to introduce myself,
I am a musician starting to get a little more serious with midi and VST etc.

I have a question about my desired setup, having just bought a Novation Impulse controller.
I would like to be able to assign some faders and buttons to control a Yamaha MO8 through MIDI and some other faders to Mainstage.

The idea is to assign the fader and the corresponding button to a specific MIDI send channel and have the MO8 in song mode so I can realize what I want.
But I want the button to 'mute' the specific channel send. So the button must toggle the midi send on and off for that specific channel.

What is the MIDI CC command to do that if it's even possible? Just turning the volume down on that channel would have the same effect, but that will effect the polyphony of my MO8 and the CPU load in Mainstage. For Mainstage I use the button to turn off the instrument in the channel strip, but for the MO8 I need a specific MIDI command I would think.
Anybody here that can help me?

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I've never heard of a generic MIDI command for toggling a given channel on and off.

Am I correct that you're wanting to transmit the song channels to the MO8, and want to toggle the transmission of the channels on or off in Mainstage, such that the channel in question is either transmitted or not transmitted to the MO8?

If that's the case, I should think that you don't need to do anything on the MO8 side.

 

[Thieson]

The Mainstage part is seperate from the MO8 part.
So my question is only about the connection between the midi keyboard and the MO8.

The MO8 is in song mode, so there are 16 (midi)channels each one with it's own midi receive channel and each one with a corresponding voice/sound.
For example: channel 1 on the MO8 has a piano, channel 2 has an organ.
fader 1 on the midi keyboard set up to send channel 1, and fader 2 to send 2. So fader 1 controls the volume of the piano and fader 2 the the organ.
setting fader 1 to zero will do the trick essentially when I want to play organ, but it will still send midi signals. So the polyphony of my MO8 will suffer. Being able to 'interrupt' the midi signal on send 1 with a toggle button will do the trick.
I've seen the MIDI command 123 which turns all the notes off, but the question is, is that a toggle command with value < 64 and value > 64?
If so, that could be the answer, but i'm not sure.

 

[anotherscott]

There is no MIDI command to turn off transmission (whether entirely or for a single channel). MIDI CC 123 turns off all currently playing notes, but doesn't stop future notes from playing. I don't know the Novation Impulse, but controllers often have zone on/off buttons to turn transmission on and off for specific channels. Alternatively, they can have user definable presets, and you could create two otherwise identical presets (i.e. the same except one has channel 1 on and the other has channel 1 off) and toggle between those two presets.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

Ditto on the zone buttons— that was going to be my suggestion once I verified whether or not I understood what you want to do.

I haven’t checked out the manual for the Novation Impulse yet, but the way things work on my M-Audio Axiom— which I think is a common way to do it, although I don’t have experience with other brands— is that there are four buttons which can be used to toggle four zones on or off as desired. Each zone can be set up to cover a specific range of keys on the controller, such that the four zones can be used for splits, layers, or a combination. Each zone can also be set to a specific MIDI channel, such that the four zones can be used for playing anywhere from four different channels on one device to one channel on four different devices [EDIT: depending on which devices are set up to receive which channels].

Then there are other buttons which can be used to recall different setups as desired, with each setup being able to have its own configuration of the four zones as far as all of the different zone-related settings (range of keys, MIDI channel used, etc.). Also, you can either set up different patch settings (Bank Select, Program Change, and Control Change messages) to be sent for each zone, or you can choose to forget about that on the controller side and handle it instead on the device side.

I imagine that the Novation Impulse or any other controller likely has similar features and capabilities to that, but I’d have to study its manual to see.

 

[delaware dave]

With the proper controller this could be possible. My Kurzweil PC3 is a great controller. In a setup you can have 16 zones. I can assign a different Midi channel to each zone. Kurz has a feature called zone mutes, which is an assignable by zone. I can turn the zones on/ off via a toggle switch (a slider, a button, a foot switch, a dial). So if I had one zone in a setup sending on channel 1 I could deactivate that zone by toggling the zone mutes via a cc assigned to a slider. When the slider is up the zone is active and the instructions of that zone are sent to the mini channel assigned to that zone. When the slider is pulled down it would inactivate the zone because it would turn on the zone mutes feature and the zone would be inactivated. Also I could set up that same slider to have the opposite effect on another zone that is assigned to a different channel and turns that zone on while simultaneously turning zone 1 off. This is why I love my Kurz. Can your controller do this?

 

[Thieson]

THnx for all the answers.

To give everybody the complete information, at the time of my opening post, I hadn't had the chance to actually use the controller.
yesterday however I used it for the first time live and there were a couple of things I couldn't get under control fast enough. I had a workaround, but it might be useful to ask my questions about it here.

So the setup is as following:
I have a Yamaha MO8 as master keyboard. This is in song mode which means that there are 16 tracks/channels all with it's own midi receive channel. Each channel has a voice/an instrument. On top of it is the Novation Impulse with the idea of using the Impulse to control my MO8 as well as a macbook running MainStage.
(in my old setup with an old Yamaha S30 on top, I was able to assign a zone/part of the S30 to a channel and therefore had a maximum of 4 instruments at once at my disposal on the S30 as a midi controller).

Because of all your great tips, yesterday I setup my Novation with 4 zones.
The first 3 I assigned to midi channels corresponding with my MO8. All on the full range of the keyboard. The 4th I dedicated to a channel corresponding with my Macbook.
Furthermore I also assigned the first 3 faders to the same channels as the first 3 zones. Expecting to have volume control over the zone. That didn't work as expected. I used CC39 (channel volume), but I couldn't get it to work. I'd expect that I could use the fader on the specific channel, thus being able to mix more voices on the MO8 from my Impulse.
The weird thing was: When I assigned a button to one of the channels and gave it a CC command 123 (all notes off) that worked fine for the channel.

The Macbook part of it worked fine. Assigning 4 faders and buttons to channel 16 and all was well. Mapping went fine and all worked as expected.

I'm just getting into advanced MIDI, so probably I'm doing something wrong, but I cannot find out what it is. I looked for specific options in the Impulse, but as far as I can tell that's all properly setup.
I hope you guys can help me. I'm rather confident that the setup I desire is possible, but can't get it working.
For the record: The zones worked fine, The keyboard played the channels I wanted. Yesterday I only needed my horn section from the MO8 (which for me are 2 voices, both with the same hornsection sound, but one is an octave higher). So there were only two channels needed.My workaround was to put the setup for the MO8 in 1 template and the macbook settings in another. The volume mix I did on the MO8, so it was workable. Because I couldnt turn the volume or midi-signals off for the horns, I had to put them in seperate templates.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I think perhaps you mean the MO8 is a slave, not a master? But that's mainly just semantics if you've got it set up correctly.

I think you should be able to toggle each of the four zones on and off as desired, rather than trying to "mute" them by turning down their channel volumes; but you'll probably still want to control the channel volume anyway, so maybe I misunderstood what you said.

However, I think you have the wrong CC for the channel volume. The MSB for channel volume is CC7, whereas CC39 (or 7+32) is the LSB. As far as I know, Yamaha uses just the MSB and ignores the LSB; and even if Yamaha were using both bytes, changing the LSB while leaving the MSB unchanged is going to produce only very miniscule changes in the volume. You should be mapping the faders to CC7 instead.

 

[Thieson]

That's something that I'll definitely try out. Thnx! I'd imagine that that would explain the fact that the button with CC123 would work in this case.
You are right by the way. In the whole MIDI setup, in this case the MO8 is a slave indeed. When I said Master Keyboard, I meant the main keyboard in my setup.

Indeed I want to do both. And be able to "Mute" (that is: turn of the zone transmitting MIDI) and adjust the volume. But with faders working I can essentially do what I want, I then only have to consider the polyphony on my MO8.
Thnx for your helpful answer, I will let you know when I've been able to try your solution.

 

[SeaGtGruff]

I’ve just been looking at the Novation Impulse manual, and I don’t see any dedicated buttons for toggling the four zones on or off, such as the M-Audio Axiom has.

The Impulse has those Mute/Solo buttons below the faders, but I don’t know whether they can be used for that purpose— perhaps if the Impulse is set to the General MIDI template?