Setlist/song mode for the VC controller?

Started by Ollii, March 30, 2022, 07:38:51 AM

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Ollii

Hello, I just came across the VC controllers. I built myself a midi controller some time ago where I could program in the order of my patches per song and it then switched through the patches in the correct order with a button. Unfortunately I never managed to give the controller a usable way to teach it the songs. That was only ever possible via the Arduino development environment directly in the source code. Now I would be interested if such a function would be interesting for the VC controllers and if there could be a chance that sixeight implements something like that.

Some more details :-)
I think most of us will always play the sounds we need per song in the same order. Example 1st verse clean, bridge crunsh, 1 chorus distorted and so on. If I could set this order of patches and snapshots per song, I wouldn't need more than 3 buttons to select all the sounds I need. The three available ones would be sufficient.

    1st button - switch between song selection and sound switching-mode.
    2nd button - depending on the mode previous song or previous part/sound.
    3rd button - depending on the mode next song or next part/sound


This is how it looks like on my selfbuilded device:

This this is a mockup I've done for the line6 ideascale site, where I tried to push the idea, too ()



What I have found in my implementation is that one keeps the overview best if always the following is to be seen in the display:


    Name of the active song
    Name of the active part
    Name of the active patch
    Name of the next part

Bye, Oliver

sixeight

Looking great. I like the colour screen.

I am still thinking about the best way to implement some form of song mode. With the VController and VC-mini it is hard to get right and hard to make it easily programmable. Also I have no need for it myself, as I like to play songs different every time.

But there is a need for it. The first VController (v1) had some form of memory mode, that was kind of cool. So thanks for your ideas. Is your code public somewhere? How do you program your unit?

Ollii

Hi, yes here you can find the code : https://create.arduino.cc/editor/in5y372/7c4a5ae3-aacb-42bb-a7ca-7f43f116cb11/preview

A few notes. The pedal is using a teensy 3.2. I have installed latched switches in the device. Was actually not planned, but had ordered the wrong ones at the time. But had the advantage that I did not have to worry about a useful button handling.

The struct element is a bit shaky. You have to be very careful that the number of part titles, patch names and midi commandos match.

I once planned to save the list of songs to an SD card as a txt file or something like that, but failed due to my time constraints and my mediocre programming skills. This would have the advantage that you wouldn't always have to go into the programming environment to change the songs, and the generation of the text file could probably be done relatively easily via a web interface. Reading data from an SD card is not that hard, but I didn't manage to get it into the Struct.

By the way, this was the first programming project for me in about 15 years :-). Apart from that I only get in touch with HTML and CSS. That explains the somewhat inelegant code.

An important usability aspect that I noticed while using it was that you have to change the background color in the mode where you select the songs. It does happen that you forget to change the mode after selecting the song. And then you do not switch the parts when it goes off but still moves in the song selection. Maybe the song selection mode should be built in a way that you automatically switch back to the part mode after 10 seconds. That would help in most cases here I think.

sixeight

Thanks for sharing.

I just found the solution that Morningstar promotes. This should work fine on the VController as well.



Though it is not the most elegant solution, it does work.

Ollii

Yes, I've seen that too. But if you take a closer look, it's not really a win live. The idea behind my device is that you can get through a whole song with just one button. With the Morningstar you have to press a different button for each part (and I don't think the programming is very intuitive either). Let's imagine we're on stage somewhere rocking out wildly and realize that right after the solo comes the quiet, clean part. Now we have to run back to the controller and press the right button. The fewer buttons there are to press and the less you have to orientate yourself as to which button you have to press, the more certain it is that you will be able to switch it over unerringly in the heat of the moment. On stage I want to concentrate mainly on my playing and the interaction with the audience and not have to look at what I have to press next :-).

By the way, with a Moddevices Dwarf I got that implemented. However, the whole setlist feature is still very error-prone and has a few things that make the use a wobbly game again.