Settling with the Gordius MIDI foot pedalboard

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Since I've had my new MIDI control pedalboard Gordius Little Giant 2
for a while now and found my ways around it I think I should post a
write-up, in case someone else is wondering about this piece of gear.
After wearing out three Behringer FCB1010 boards in the last ten years
I realized that the LG2 will be cheaper if I am going to use it for
more than three years, the normal life span of an FCB1010. Not only
cheaper in the long run but also smaller, lighter and more portable.
And of course a lot deeper and more powerful.

Related to the FCB the LG2 offers two (or four) more switches per
bank, if adding external switches to the 10 switches on the board.
There are four jacks for externals and you can configure them as you
want regarding number of external switches vs expression pedals. I
have settled with using two extra switches and two expression pedals
(I heard Andy Butler runs his LG set up for 4 expression pedals).
Anyway, I use those two extra switches for scrolling up or down my pre
looper audio effect patch list while dedicating the banks for only
looping commands.

The LG2 has room for 250 banks (FCB limited to 10) but I only use 8
and will try to keep it that tiny. For each bank you can define any
combination of MIDI events that shall be sent out by any of the ten
switches. You can also redefine the expression pedal's to use them for
a specific purpose within one particular bank - or even within one
particular preset/switch.

The architecture of the Gordius builds on three levels: Patches,
Presets and Banks. A Patch is where you define MIDI events to be sent
out. A Preset can me any combination of patches and you may name them
to show up on the Gordius display (like "Granular Lobotomy #3"). A
Bank is were you assign presets to the physical switches on the Little
Giant. Banks may also be named to show up in the display (like "Bank
Of Songbuilding") A cool thing is that you can create more of them all
than you actually assign to be used in the banks you perform with, and
this makes room for experimenting and developing exciting setups "on
the side".

 If you control gear that doesn't let you scale a continuous control
curve this feature is offered by the LG2. I think a lot of loopists
may benefit from that. Personally I prefer to do scaling in the
receiving end because I often hook up a lot of processors to the same
expression pedal curve and each process may need its own
interpretation of the CC# sent out by the LG2. This is possible
because all my processing and looping are done inside a laptop and the
Mainstage 2 software offers such configurable scaling on the target
end of live control. But back when I used boxes like EDP, Repeater,
Akai MFC42 and Lexicon I would have loved the output scaling offered
by Gordius!

Well, that's about it as far as I'm concerned. Just like the case is
with the Mobius looper I tend to use very little of the powerful
features built into the Gordius Little Giant 2. My concern is rather
to keep it small, portable and optimally playable when improvising
music in an experimental context...

But looking into what the LG2 offers I can imagine it would be totally
awesome for all those guitar players that play with Ozzy and them
alike... I mean boys with lotsa stacks 'n racks that gotta be tamed to
behave within a gig playlist for a planned show. It seems the LG2 is
so deep that you may set up whatever show you plan to put on, it's
just a question of putting enough time into the preparations. For a
pro tour that would be perfect.

One should definitely use the USB cable and the Windows software to
set up the pedalboard. A Mac OS version of the editor is planned, but
I would advice Mac musicians to dedicate 5 GB drive space for a
Bootcamp partition with Windows only to run the Gordius Control Center
editor application.

For all the Gordius deepness I have not covered here, check out the
manual at http://www.gordius.be/

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com
www.looproom.com internet music hub