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Switching between instruments/apps live from a single midi controller
For example in ThumbJam, the 8 different instrument channels are assigned to midi channels 1-8 (if omni mode is off). Since my midi controller only has the option to send messages either on a single channel or on all channels, how do I access or combine the different sounds live from the controller?
I have used midibridge to reroute incoming midi notes from one channel to another using presets in midibridge, but now that I want to start combining instruments, it seems that would require needing to manage toomany presets for all of the different combinations.I'm thinking there has to be an easier way to do this and am wondering what you guys are doing?
Basic example of what I want to do:
My Korg Taktile has 8 function buttons (x3 modes for each, but let's just say there are 8). I want each of those buttons to toggle on/off the corresponding 8 different instruments loaded in ThumbJam. So if I toggle on buttons 1 and 3, those sounds are combined while the others remain muted. Toggling all buttons on combines all instruments and vice versa, you get it. 
Comments
You know it's funny how this works, but right after posting it dawned on me that I am probably making this too complicated and could handle this in the Audio realm instead of the midi realm.
Instead of trying to reroute midi channels I could just send all midi channels from my controller, and then load each of the 8 instruments into a separate channel in AUM, and then toggle the channel mutes on and off with the toggles reversed (button engaged is muted but led is on so it looks active). This might overload my device though with 8+ instrument samples being triggered all of the time, but I am going to try this.
But if anyone has figured out a way to do this via midi I'm still all ears!
Mmmm - if you want to try to do it with midi then possibly MidiFlow could handle it. I'd say that's you're best bet anyway.
I've looked at midi flow before and while it has a cleaner AB type look and feel, does it really offer anything that midibridge doesn't? It shows the midi messages like Midivision so I guess it has the features of both apps combined into one, but I'm not seeing anything like the stream byter in there which is the best part of midibridge if you want to get down and dirty.
I was going to suggest the AUM route, but I haven't quite figured it out yet myself.
Specifically, I've been wondering: does Thumbjam for iPhone have the same setup with instruments controlled by MIDI Channels 1 - 8? Or is that iPad only? I couldn't get it to work right with AUM the other day on iPhone.
I'm still in the process of switching from sampletank to TJ as my main VI app so I'm still in the weeds, but I got that info from the help menu. I would assume it would be the same. In the midi menu the "In channel start" needs to indicate something other than omni to work this way.
Thanks! but..., well thats confusing. I thought it would need to be set to omni MIDI in.
I guess this actually makes sense if we are talking about channel start. So could you potentially have instruments 1 -8 assigned to MIDI channel 9-16 if you set "In channel start" to 9?
i'll test later, I think you may have found what I was missing. cheers
Yes, exactly. For the AUM Audio muting method to work the external midi controller would have to send on all channels (omni) but TJ would have to be set to a specific channel - which would be the start of where the instruments would be controlled like you stated.
The more I think about it, sending to all channels from my midi controller is scary. It would mean I'd need to have a really tight integration so that any single CCs being sent aren't inadvertently messing with different controls of the different apps. Ugh. Where's the Excedrin.
I was doing this inadvertently. I loaded up a midi file I had created in notion into auria, then sent the midi to TJ, that I was sending back as an audio feed. But as soon as I pressed play in Auria to start recording, TJ would flip to another instrument. I'm a midi newbie, and it drove me crazy for a bit. Someone in here said it was probably a control being sent, and Sonosaurus chimed in with some advice, so I turned off receiving controls in TJ, and it worked. Not sure what the control sequence was that was sent, but it doesn't much matter for what I was trying to do, I got the affect to go away.
What is with Korg and the MIDI Channel thing? Srsly? A MIDI controller that doesn't allow you to change channels? I get it on something tiny like the nanokey but the Taktile?
Edit: Or maybe I'm confused. It was bugging me enough that I looked at http://i.korg.com/uploads/Support/USA_TRTK_taktile_PG_E1.pdf and it says there's a Global MIDI Channel (page 15) which can be set from 1 to 16. That should be all you need to change to do what you want. /end edit
Here are a couple of MIDI flow links that might help you decide if it can do what you want:
http://www.midiflow.com/documentation/#midi-learn
http://www.midiflow.com/documentation/#preset-numbers
http://www.midiflow.com/documentation/#controller-assignments
tl;dr: In MIDIFlow it's dead easy to assign a (pretty much) any MIDI message to do manipulate a specific on screen control or to trigger one of many actions, including "next/prev preset". So you'd make 8 presets, each mapping channel 1 to channel 1,2,3... and then hit one of your available buttons to scroll through the 8 presets.
Think you could also have one preset with 8 channels in it (1>1, 1>2, 1>3...) and use a midi command to mute all but one or set the midi channel filter on that channel.
The SB remains a killer feature of MIDI Bridge but MIDIFlow has quite a number of the SB's use cases built into the app directly. For mortals.
Ha, thanks. But there's no way to combine/layer sounds on the fly that way. And switching midi channels via the taktile is not a quick way to switch sounds. You have to menu dive and although the I love taktile, the menu still confuses me. And honestly I would be using my fishman triple play most of the time to do this (I just used my taktile as an easy to understand example) and there's no way to quickly switch midi channels on that.
Sampletank allows you to layer instruments because you can assign multiple instruments to the same midi channel within a sampletank preset. But if I want to combine/layer sounds between different apps, there is no way to do this without handling it on the audio side of things using mutes (which I still have yet to test).
I guess my point is that it seems odd that it is so difficult to do this via midi and I'm surprised this isn't more commonly discussed as an issue.
So it sounds like you are really requesting a feature for ThumbJam to support stacking multiple instruments that can be played from the same midi channel (and on the screen too, I'm guessing). Right? I want that too, but I don't think it will make it in this imminent update.
So the other posters are basically coming up with ways you might be able to replicate your single channel midi source into multiple channels to send into TJ. I'll see if I can actually build a setup like that using one of the midi routing apps.
Yeah sorry, trying to switch over to TJ from Sampletank is what drew me into this but really it would apply to the stacking of any apps/instruments within apps. I didn't mean to call out TJ like that.
Ideally I'm envisioning up to a 16 button switchboard interface (one for each midi channel), with each button corresponding to a different instrument/app, where you can mix and match any of them in any combination at any time and control them from a single midi controller. Maybe there really isn't a way to do this.
I think there is also an upcoming feature in AUM that will take care of this issue.
[edit: actually, most likely not going to happen]
Sonosaurus are awesome.
Yes, please! This is one thing that I have found myself muttering to myself when using TJ.
OK, I made a preset in Midiflow which requires the Controller Condition add-on. Unfortunately the built-in sharing feature in Midiflow appears broken so I'll just describe it.
Basically I added 8 routes, each taking the Input Keyboard as input, and ThumbJam as output. In the configuration for each, set the Remap Channel to the channels 1 through 8 respectively. Also, for each a condition was added in the Restrict to Conditions section to use a CC as the toggle. I arbitrarily chose CC21 - 28 set on each route respectively. This means you can use your Taktile's buttons set to those CCs as toggles, and individually toggle off the routing of your input keyboard to each of the routes sending to TJ slots.
You could have a similar set of routes for your other apps and use different CCs as toggles so you could use different banks on your taktile to control layering to them too.
This makes a heck of a lot of sense and thank you for taking the time to do this. I was just thinking this morning that some sort of conditional programming would probably be required in order to do this, and wasn't aware that Midiflow offered this option, so thanks for that tip too. It seems that controller condition feature could be really useful for other things too once I have some more time to wrap my head around what all can be done with it.
I guess that means I'm off to buy Midiflow and will be trying this as soon as I get a chance, thanks again.
@sonosaurus - It's a home run and is everything I hoped it would be!