Re: affordable portable usb foot-controller with pedal

[Rainer Straschill <moinsound@googlemail.com>]

Per said:
> The fact that it doesn't offer banks could be problematic for users that 
>need access to controlling many parameters while playing (I use 80 to 100 
>parameters).

...which is basically a problem all of us are facing to some degree,
not only with regard to MIDI controllers, especially if your music
contains a large portion of improvised material:
How to manage the tradeoff between a simple, small and easily
controllable setup and the possible wish for a huge functionality?

It's possible to do looping with one (Boss RC-2) or two (Akai
Headrush, EH SMM) footswitches. On the other hand, Mobius functions
easily take up more than 30 footswitches, and then you still have a
lot of context-sensitive behaviour (aka "alternate endings").

So how far can you go with the four footswitches (and one exp pedal)
the Line6 has to offer? Is it only the feature set of a DL4 and
nothing more, or are there ways around it?

First of all, in theory (and using a sophisticated MIDI handling, and
I'm not saying that it's nice to operate), you can put the exp pedal
into the equation: give every switch a different function depending on
the pedal being "toe", "heel", "upper half" or "lower half". Voila,
you already have 16 different assignments.

Another idea is to actually work within a composed framework - which
does not specifiy any content, only the processing (including looping)
applied within a flowchart. For that, you basically need two
footswitches ("go to next step" and "branch to alternative path"), so
you still have two to spare (e.g. one for tap tempo and one for sudden
ending/reset/panic/whatever).
Something like that works quite well e.g. in Ableton Live, although
implementing the different automation you need for effects, Mobius
etc. will be much more of a challenge than to simply play a nice piece
of music ;).

         Rainer

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