Midi Controller - assignable buttons

I have a Behringer UMX 610, which is a popular controller among the Hauptwerk community and understandably so. The 8 assignable buttons work fine when assigned for organ stops using HW's auto-detect function however when assigning them to a piston, which is more practical for my use, it takes a double tap to get it to engage.

I kind of understand why as a real piston is pressed then retracts which confuses the simple controller button which has to re-sync back to the correct state, thus the double tap. I experimented a bit with the HW advanced Midi assignments but no luck.

Has anyone been successful in getting a controller buttons to engage as a piston with just 1 touch?

Thanks,

Danny B.

[mdyde]

Hello Danny,

What MIDI message does a button send when you press it, and what message does it send when you release it?

You can check by temporarily turning on MIDI logging on Hauptwerk's 'General settings | General preferences | Advanced ...' screen tab, then pressing and releasing one of the buttons, the using 'Help | View diagnostic log' to see the messages that Hauptwerk received from the button. Perhaps copy/paste the relevant messages here, so that we can see them exactly.

Hello Martin:

That was an excellent idea. I happened to use another MIDI monitor program which uncovered the issue. Basically there is no MIDI message after a button is released. This seems to be standard operation for these type of controller buttons and probably other keyboards as well. Pressing a button gives a value of 127 and pressing it again gives a value of 0. Each press the output alternates between these two values.

However the last 2 buttons (#7 and #8) consistently sent a value of 0 and 64 respectively which of course worked perfectly for a piston assignment! Reading through the UMX 610 manual the CC (default) assignments for these last two buttons are 07 (Channel Volume) and 10 (Panning) which transmits a single value. Therefore I re-assigned the other six buttons accordingly using the on board Behringer controls to different unused MIDI channels. Thus:

Button 1 = Midi Ch 8, CC=07 (transmits a constant value of 0)
Button 2 = Midi Ch 8, CC=10 (transmits a constant value of 64)
Button 3 = Midi Ch 9, CC=07 "
Button 4 = Midi Ch 9, CC=10 "
Button 5 = Midi Ch 10, CC=07 "
Button 6 = Midi Ch 10, CC=10 "
Button 7 = Midi Ch 1, CC=07 {default assignments)
Button 8 = Midi Ch 1, CC=10 "

Problem solved. Hope this thread will help other UMX 610 owners.

Danny

[mdyde]

Thanks, Danny.

Excellent.

Actually, I think you should find that Hauptwerk would have been able to auto-detect and work with the original button messages, provided that you had pressed each button *twice* when auto-detecting, so that Hauptwerk's auto-detection would know to expect CC values 0 and 127 alternately. Hauptwerk's switch event type for that is the 'Momentary piston: MIDI CC-on and/or CC-off' entry (but auto-detection should configure it automatically).

Anyway, that's largely irrelevant now that you have the buttons configured to use more conventional MIDI implementation.

Surely there's no need to use a different midi channel for each button??? I don't!

[mdyde]

Surely there's no need to use a different midi channel for each button??? I don't!

Hauptwerk itself has no requirements in terms of MIDI channels for pistons/switches/buttons (except of course that the MIDI message from each must be unique, so that they can be told apart by some means).