Very nice MIDI Pedal board spotted at NAMM...coming...soon-ish

Started by vanceg-fgn, January 14, 2011, 08:08:10 PM

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vanceg-fgn

I was pretty thrilled to see the new prototype of a foot controller from RJM (www.rjmmusic.com) at the NAMM show today.  At it's heart, this is a highly programmable, very flexible MIDI footswitch board...vaguely similar to the Rocktron All Access or the Fractal Audio MFC-101.  It's very sturdy (stage worthy, for sure), has several rows of buttons which can be assigned to send any MIDI message, and it has 6 inputs for expression pedals and two for external switches...and of course it's got MIDI out (including MIDI over XLR, which is pretty cool for creating very heavy duty stage worthy systems).

BUT, the thing that attracted me to it was that over EACH of the switches is an LED screen. This means that you can DYNAMICALLY label each one of your switches!  This is a HUGELY USEFUL feature when you are programming a system to control a whole bunch of devices at once.  This allows you to look down at the pedal board and know exactly what parameter(S) each switch is mapped to control.  I LOVE the idea of setting my controller board up so that each switch turns one of my plugins or effects on my VG-99 on and off (pedal board mode) and then switching into another mode in which all of my VG-99 patches are listed and I can select from them, then into another mode in which the same buttons control the transport of my looper.

I have wanted a pedal board that allows for dynamic labeling of the buttons for.....ever.  I even looked into having one built custom (pretty damn expensive).

This is a pretty serious, pro board.  It's also not quite on the market yet. They are hoping for late this year.  I'm hoping too!


vanceg-fgn