Guitar looper / Footswitch

jwhitmore

There's a chap on the YouTube who does interesting looping with the Digitakt,

I'd like to do something similar with the Deluge, but think I need a footswitch.

As an aside I think an alternative to the footswitch would be to program into arranger view that you want to create a loop at a certain point in the performance and the Deluge just records at the point in time. I might not be explaining that very well. Say you have a 4 bar synth intro and then you have in the arranger an eight bar section where it's going to record 'Guitar Loop A'. After recording 'Loop A' from bars 5 to 12 it can play that back later in the piece. So at bar 24 play back the 8 bars you recorded at bar 4.

That makes sense in my head but maybe I'll just get back to the footswitch. Deluge used to do a footswitch, but I'd like to make my own, so I'm wondering what are the specs for a footswitch. I assume it's going to be MIDI, but then I already have a MIDI controller plugged into the USB. If I can use both the USB Midi and the old style MIDI connector at the same time then we're golden. MIDI is a fairly simple protocol so can I just make a footswitch and when the switch is pressed transmit a midi message? So are there certain messages which much be used to trigger a looper action or is it a case of just sending messages on any channel and 'Learn' the messages on the Deluge?

There's possibly a 'shift' 'loop start' button on the pads, there's just so many buttons I might have missed it.

Icoustik

You need midi notes from your footswitch for triggering midi commands, which can be found in the settings menu (Shift+press Select) under the MIDI>CMD section Any midi notes, any channel, that's up to you which you wanna learn to the commands.

FYI the arranger programmed looping thing has already been suggested and noted.

jwhitmore

Thanks a million for that, going to have to read the MIDI spec.

On programmed looping that's great news. I hope it's not a huge feature to implement. I'm sure there's a bit of a code base already in the Deluge.

jwhitmore

Me again, hello all. I've been playing with a microcontroller, some code and a Baud rate of 31250. That's gone well and I'm happy enough with the pedal end of things. I ordered up 5 momentary footswitches, not thinking that I'd need 5, but now very conscious of the fact that I'm not sure how many I do need. I seem to remember that the Synthstrom footswitch, when it was available, had four switches? They may not have been momentary, but might have been toggle switches?

I guess I'll have to try it out and see what works, I guess it depends on the complexity/flexibility of the looping feature of the Deluge, I'm still getting the hang of it and probably still not using close to 100% of it's functionality. I guess four footswitches will do for now.

jwhitmore

Think I found an alternative to using the Deluge as a looper in my system so all is good