i’m looking to buy a footswitch that will let me send midi but i cant find one using google - all that comes up are big multi switch boards with expression pedals and the like - i just want one button that i can tap to let me do a number of things such as…
… emulate a key press through rejoice or something to let me press spacebar when recording guitar etc.
… send midi so i can use it as a basic kik drum pedal
… fire off loops in ableton
… use as a stomp box so i can switch between clean and distortion or whatever in software
… etc, etc
Does anyone know of such a piece of kit?
just want a simple switch affair that i can stand on.
i realise i could use an old gamepad or something and build my own but i really dont have the time or skill.
if you have a midi controller that accepts a sustain pedal, you could use a cheap one to trigger sounds and such. you could use a midi translator or a PD/max patch to customize the message if it’s not to you’re liking.
We made footswitch of cheap gamepad. We made custom wood housing box, really beautiful. Bought decent footswitch switches from shop, soldered them to the joypad, added longer USB cable. Really nice. Works very well for all the scenarios you described.
If you want I can get the pictures and if your really want we can build you one according to your needs for some amount of money.
I had a setup similar to this using the pedals from a game wheel/pedal set with bidule interpreting the signals to the midi messages required and midi yoke to send the signals as a general midi input to renoise etc.
I think I made a thread in ideas and suggestions with a link to the bidule document I was using…
The only problem I had with this method was there was a slight lag due to all the interpretations between the different pieces of software.
if you wanted that to work exactly like a kick drum, you could use a kick trigger with a real kick drum beater, or an electronic kick drum (from an electronic drum kit). however that will cost way more i think. but if you want proper response like a real kick drum, in terms of being able to trigger sounds rhythmically exactly with precision… it might be the only serious way to go.
saw this, which is also not cheap, but might do what you want quite well if you set up those foot keys to trigger what you want http://www.dv247.com/invt/25837/
in theory you could also set up a normal bass drum pedal to hit something, and use the amplitude peak to trigger a midi note, which might be a cheap way to do it, as you could pick up a bass drum pedal cheaply if you already have a microphone… but you’d need max/msp or PD to do that i think. you could get the loudness peak to affect velocity on the midi note too, but it might fall apart as soon as there are any other loud sounds happening around it of course…
all the above would be for setups where you need rhythmic precision. for the other stuff you mention any old foot device ought to do the trick. in which case in terms of economic-ness, you might want to use some sort of midi pad to trigger rhythmic sounds and just use pedals for stuff where precision is less important.
im learning drums and one day i’ll mess around with kind of stuff + max/msp and it will be fun.
