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Novation Launchpad, controller of the gods?



I just received a Novation Launchpad and thought some of you might be

interested in some technical details.

 

It works fine with Live, I won't go into detail on that since I'm more

interested in using it with other applications, but if I were a heavy

Live user I would definitely get one.

 

It speaks normal MIDI so with some work it can be used with other

applications.  If you have Novation's Automap utility you can do some

basic mapping of pads to plugin parameters but to get the most out of

it you will need to write code or Max/MSP patches to control it.

 

It's about 10 inches square and 1/2 inch thick.  Build quality is

okay, the case is plastic but it feels solid enough.  If you dropped

it it would probably survive.  It has to sit on a table, there is no

stand socket on the bottom.

 

The pads are smaller than on most drum pad controllers like the

Trigger Finger, less than an inch square.  They are not velocity

sensitive which makes this of limited use as a drum controller.

Pressing a pad produces a soft "click" that you can feel but not hear.

This let's you know the button has been engaged but I found it

slightly annoying.

 

The pictures and most of the videos make it look like the default

state of the buttons are bright white but they're not.  When a button

is off, it has a slightly translucent dull grey color which is not

that bad but not nearly as pretty as it looks in pictures.  Under each

pad are two LEDs one green and one red.  These can be set to one of

three shades (low, medium, and high) and combined to produce shades of

yellow and orange.  They don't do white.

 

In theory you have 16 shades available for each button (4 states

squared).  In practice many of the shades that combine red and green

are so slightly different that they can't be used as static

indicators.  You can use them to show "movement" by cycling through

the shades, you'll see the difference when they change.  But for

buttons that just glow one color it's hard to tell the difference

between "Red Low + Green Low" and "Red Low + Green Medium".  Also

there is variance in the brightness of the leds from pad to pad so

when combining them to make yellow it looks quite "splotchy", some are

very yellow and others look like pale green.

 

So in practice I found around 6 or 7 really distinct shades that could

be used as static indicators.  The rest could be used to make

pulsating lightshows like the Kaoss pad.  Overall I was a bit

disappointed in the colors, it is not as pretty as the videos or the

picture on the box, but hey the price is still reasonable.

 

It is not programmable.  It only sends a fixed set of MIDI notes for

each pad and CC's for the buttons along the top.  All are on channel 1

and this cannot be changed.  So if you want to combine this with MIDI

from another source, say an FCB1010, you'll have to reprogram the FCB

to send on a different channel, or do channel mapping in software.

 

The videos make it look like it has "pages" for example in Mixer mode

there is a page for volume control, one for pan, etc.  This is all

done in Live.  The Launchpad itself doesn't change what notes the pads

send when you select page buttons, the application has to watch for

the page buttons and dynamically change note mappings to do different

things.

 

For example, in the demo for controlling track levels, each column of

pads acts like a "fader".  The pads light up from the bottom to

whatever pad you press, press the top pad and the fader is all the way

up, press a pad in the center and the fader is around halfway up, etc.

The hardware is not magically converting this into CC7 for the

application, it's just sending notes and it is up to the application

to respond to them and turn the other lights in the column on or

off.  This is why with Automap you can't do much with this besides

trigger things.  There are no knobs and the virtual faders are a

trick supported only by Live.

 

So in summary, if you're a Max hacker or write your own applications,

it is possible to do everything Live does and more but it will take

some work.   This will work well for controlling Mobius since

the architecture is fairly close to Live.  But the fun part

will be making pulsating light shows :)

 

Jeff