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HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

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AEK

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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostMon Jun 13, 2011 5:06 pm

Thank you. Found it! :D :D :D
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostMon Jun 13, 2011 5:10 pm

timhowarduk wrote:This has got me really interested. One question - do you need the Advanced version of HW to use a launchpad with LED lights?

Thanks
Tim


Hauptwerk 4 Basic Edition now features MIDI output unlike version 3, so the Launchpad output settings will work with the Basic Edition of version 4 as well as the Advanced Edition.
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostMon Jun 13, 2011 5:13 pm

G3 wrote:Hello AEK,
My copy was in my spam folder.

George (G3)


Most likely due to the fact that it was a mass emailing to several users (those we know of that are using Novation Launchpads). Please add info [at] milandigitalaudio [dot] com to your address book to help ensure that future emails will not end up in your spam folder.

Glad you found it however!
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostMon Jun 13, 2011 8:06 pm

Dear kiwiplant and all,

You're on to something here with these overlays for the Launchpad. More work and research needs to be done. I have a friend who works for a sign company and they have some pretty sophisticated equipment. He is one of my organ students, so I might be able to have him look into this.

Other forum Launchpad members...what are your thoughts? Ideas?

I used a Dymo Labelmaker with clear labels with black letters. It's OK, but far from polished, I can tell you that.

George (G3)
Owner/Builder of Hammond-Hauptwerks X-66 3-manual organ.
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostTue Jun 14, 2011 6:37 am

Hello again Launchpad users,

I decided it might just about be feasible/distinguishable/useful to squeeze another shade of colour out of the Launchpad LEDs between the previous 'orange' and 'red'. (If you find the 'orange', 'amber' and 'yellow' too close to be useful you can always just pick one or two of them and ignore the other(s).)

Hence I've emailed you all another temporary development build that adds support for the additional colour. The previous 'orange' is now renamed to 'amber' and a new 'orange' colour is included with more red content. Any settings from the previous build will continue to work as they did in that build, but you now have an additional colour option when auto-detecting.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostTue Jun 14, 2011 6:57 am

On the subject of physically labelling Launchpad buttons:

Hello George,

In the course of my working with the Launchpad (which I really like, by the way), I didn't find the absence of text on the buttons to be a significant issue in practice, at least not with organs of small and medium size.

The way I've been using it is to assign buttons in the same layout that their stops appear on the virtual stop jambs, use colours to show groupings, and leaving buttons unassigned (unlit) where there are gaps in the real stop jambs, so that I can see the overall shapes of the jambs at glance.

With a computer monitor in sight I found I could quickly and instinctively learn the layout of the stops, initially referring to the monitor if needed.

E.g. I currently have the St. Anne's console:

Image

... set up with (somewhat arbitrarily) orange for couplers/tremulant, red for reeds, yellow for diapasons, amber for strings, green for flutes. This picture shows my Launchpad with all stops off:

Image

... and this one with the default divisional combinations '4' selected for all three divisions (i.e. showing some stops on):

Image

(Actually I accidentally had the Great and Pedal diapasons assigned to amber, rather than the intended yellow when I took those photographs - sorry for any confusion.)

I also have a set of Classic MIDI Works keyboards, which have plenty of MIDI thumb pistons, although if I needed more pistons I'd probably be tempted to buy another Launchpad rather than to lose the recognisable layout on the 'stop jambs' Launchpad by filling in too many of the gaps.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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AEK

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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostTue Jun 14, 2011 5:45 pm

Hello all.
I beg your pardon once for my naive question, but I recently started using HW and Launchpad.
1. I downloaded and installed the driver for Launchpad Mac OS X.
2. Using the auto-assigned buttons Launchpad stops jambs Manual
As a result Launchpad buttons work, but not glowing. Help please understand that I did or did not. Do I need besides the driver use the Automap? What are some regimes need to be installed at the Lanchpad?

Image

Martin, Thank you for Update v4.0.01.026. I added your e-mail in "personal" and became normally receive letters..
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostTue Jun 14, 2011 6:57 pm

It works here ok without Automap. I totally uninstalled Automap because it never worked right. I'm running on a Mac with OS X 10.6.7. Do you have the Launchpad selected in both the MIDI IN ports and MIDI OUT ports area in Hauptwerk? That is in General Settings -> MIDI Ports

I also have a driver called NovationUSBMIDIDriver.plugin in
/Macintosh HD/Library/Audio/MIDI Drivers

Not sure if perhaps that driver is needed to get the LEDs to change colors.
http://www.novationmusic.com/support/la ... usb_driver

Paul
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostWed Jun 15, 2011 4:52 am

Thanks Paul. Of course I had not thought to include MIDI OUT. :)
Now everything is perfectly working!
VIVAT ! :D :D :D
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostWed Jun 15, 2011 5:11 am

A post from a separate forum topic from JulianMoney-Kyrle (to try to keep the discussion in one place):

Dear Martin,

Further to your email about temporary build 4.0.1.0.26 supporting additional Launchpad colours...

How many colours are your supporting? From what I remember of the Launchpad specifications it uses four bits of the MIDI velocity information to give three brightnesses each of red and green, together with off for each, which gives a theoretical total of 16 colours/shades (including off).

In practice I don't know how many of these are distinguishable, and I am not going to have a chance to play with it for a few weeks, but in the meantime I have been having fun planning various colour schemes to control the stops. I am thinking along the lines of yellow for flue stops (with the stops in,medium for 8', dim for 16', 4' and 2', and bright for stops out), red for the reeds (medium for 8', dim for other pitches and bright for on) and green for mutations (dim for single ranks, medium for compound stops and mixtures, bright for on), which would leave yellow/green (lime?) and orange/amber for other controls such as tremulant, couplers and miscellaneous organ controls (e.g. the 8'/16' bourdon toggle for the Bosch-Schnitger). Any buttons not used for that particular sample set would be permanently off. For this sort of scheme it would be useful, e.g., for couplers to be dim orange (red medium + green dim) changing to bright when on (red bright + green medium) etc.

When a sample set is first loaded I should imagine that the default in Lanuchpad would be to start with all lights off, so I am planning to set a piston to pull out all the stops/couplers/etc. (illuminating the Launchpad buttons in their bright coloured state), then press general cancel, which would leave all the buttons corresponding to actual controls in their illuminated dim (stops in) state so that I can see which buttons are active for that particular organ. This assumes that I will be able to send one colour state to show that a control is on and a different one for off again (I don't know quite what implementation you have arranged).

The challenge is trying to come up with some form of stop control that can be used with all sample sets and at the same time displaying useful information about which buttons / switches control which stops. This is where I think the Launchpad has the advantage over X-keys or indeed any other form of stop control. Of course the ideal would be solenoid-activated drawstops with an LED text label for each one, but that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to set up. For rocker tabs (which I don't have) I suppose it would be possible to have a printed strip with the stop names for each sampe set. The Launchpad, however, seems very cheap and easy for what it does.

With Best Wishes,
Julian
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostWed Jun 15, 2011 5:31 am

Hello Julian,

How many colours are your supporting? From what I remember of the Launchpad specifications it uses four bits of the MIDI velocity information to give three brightnesses each of red and green, together with off for each, which gives a theoretical total of 16 colours/shades (including off).

In practice I don't know how many of these are distinguishable, and I am not going to have a chance to play with it for a few weeks, but in the meantime I have been having fun planning various colour schemes to control the stops. I am thinking along the lines of yellow for flue stops (with the stops in,medium for 8', dim for 16', 4' and 2', and bright for stops out), red for the reeds (medium for 8', dim for other pitches and bright for on) and green for mutations (dim for single ranks, medium for compound stops and mixtures, bright for on), which would leave yellow/green (lime?) and orange/amber for other controls such as tremulant, couplers and miscellaneous organ controls (e.g. the 8'/16' bourdon toggle for the Bosch-Schnitger). Any buttons not used for that particular sample set would be permanently off. For this sort of scheme it would be useful, e.g., for couplers to be dim orange (red medium + green dim) changing to bright when on (red bright + green medium) etc.


My photos earlier in this post show the colours that are supported (red, orange, amber, yellow, green). Orange, amber and yellow are all quite close in colour. I find them just different enough to be useful but if you find them too hard to distinguish then you can always just use a subset of them.

Each of the colours that Hauptwerk supports show in the 'bright' state when a stop is on and in the 'dim' state when a stop is off, so that you can both see the stop state clearly whilst also seeing a stop's grouping even if a stop is off.

You aren't able to choose brightnesses or colours for stops manually beyond those that Hauptwerk supports. I chose the supported colours because they were the largest set that I felt could in practice allow 'on' and 'off' states to be clearly distinguishable, whilst allowing the colours themselves to remain distinguishable.

'Fully on/off' and 'Always off' are also supported for LEDs. If a Launchpad button isn't assigned to a virtual control then Hauptwerk will always ensure its LED is kept turned off and Hauptwerk automatically turns off all LEDs when unloading, changing or resetting organs and ensures that LED states remain synchronised at all times with the virtual controls to which you've assigned them.

You don't need to do anything manually for that, and no knowledge of how the Launchpad or its MIDI implementation works is needed - just let Hauptwerk handle it all natively and transparently.

When a sample set is first loaded I should imagine that the default in Lanuchpad would be to start with all lights off, so I am planning to set a piston to pull out all the stops/couplers/etc. (illuminating the Launchpad buttons in their bright coloured state), then press general cancel, which would leave all the buttons corresponding to actual controls in their illuminated dim (stops in) state so that I can see which buttons are active for that particular organ. This assumes that I will be able to send one colour state to show that a control is on and a different one for off again (I don't know quite what implementation you have arranged).


As above, no - you don't need to do that. Hauptwerk will do it all automatically and correctly for you.

Hauptwerk will always light up the assigned buttons in their correct states and colours when you load an organ, and will make sure that any unassigned buttons have their LEDs turned off.

The challenge is trying to come up with some form of stop control that can be used with all sample sets and at the same time displaying useful information about which buttons / switches control which stops. This is where I think the Launchpad has the advantage over X-keys or indeed any other form of stop control. Of course the ideal would be solenoid-activated drawstops with an LED text label for each one, but that would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to set up. For rocker tabs (which I don't have) I suppose it would be possible to have a printed strip with the stop names for each sampe set. The Launchpad, however, seems very cheap and easy for what it does.


I really like the Launchpad and found it be a very viable option for controlling Hauptwerk stops and pistons, particularly now that Hauptwerk can integrate natively and transparently with it, without any MIDI knowledge or programming needed on the part of the user.

I think it's a simple, easy, effective, relatively inexpensive (as MIDI hardware goes) and fairly ergonomic off-the-shelf and readily-available option for virtual organ stop and piston control that's well-suited for use with multiple sample sets.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostWed Jun 15, 2011 7:56 am

I've found the support works well (admittedly only after a fairly short time) and is really straight-forward to set up.

From the Programmer’s Manual for the LaunchPad, the colour of each LED is controlled by 2 bits for red (off, low, medium, full) and 2 bits for green, making a total number of possible settings 16 - mixxing these in varying strengths give the colours. You can also have a LED flash.

HW4 is supporting 5 “colours” at two levels of intensity, plus off and fully on making a total of 12 "colours" available. As Martin says, I assume that the 4 that are not used not sufficiently distinct to be worth while using (and from my HW3 experiments with the LaunchPad would tend to agree). Would the “flashing” option be of value? It could be used on a toggle switch to indicate some activity (for example recording active) but would this might be too distracting.

Iain
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostWed Jun 15, 2011 8:07 am

Hello Iain,

In my experiments I concluded that flashing probably wasn't something that people would want to use in practice (or at least its use would be so limited as not to be worth the settings' extra screen clutter and complexity for it). The only things I could think of that you might realistically want to use a flashing LED for were 'recording', 'Set" and maybe 'Scope', i.e. 'dangerous' modal states.
Best regards, Martin.
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostWed Jun 15, 2011 5:57 pm

Thank-you, Martin, for your detailed explanation. It seems that you have implemented exactly what I wanted, but in a way that is much simpler to set up and use than I was thinking of. It seems that the missing colours only exist because of the way that the Launchpad encodes them, and are probably too similar to the others to be particularly useful.

The next problem is what arrangement to use when assigning the Launchpad buttons. I would be interested to know how people are approaching this.

My first thought was to use roughly the same arrangement with all sample sets, e.g. divisions going from left to right to correspond to the physical manuals (swell on the top, great in the middle, choir next right and pedal far right) and within that to have the flue stops in ascending ptich (16' on the bottom, then 8', 4', 2' and mixtures) with the reeds on the top (from top to bottom, 16', 8', 4'), then within a division to have principals on the left, and flutes on the right, and single rank mutations (nazard, tierce etc.) above the flutes, i.e. to the right of the mixtures. Roughly the same layout could be used with a number of different sample sets provided that there aren't so many stops that they have to be packed in willy-nilly. The stops could then be colour-coded according to type (principals in yellow, reeds in red, flutes in green, mutations in amber or whatever). Couplers could be assigned to the round buttons on the right-hand side.

Alternatively the colours could correspond to pitches, e.g. 8' in yellow, 4' in green, 2' in orange etc.

For a Cavaille-Coll instrument, where the whole structure and concept is quite different, an alternative scheme might be necessary, particularly to accommodate the anches.

Your suggestion, on the other hand, would be to copy as far as possible the physical layout of the stops for each organ. The advantage of this is that the Launchpad buttons would then correspond to the screen, but each organ would have to be individually learnt. For some Baroque instruments the physical arrangement of the stops seems to defy logic, particularly when some of the stops are divided into bass and treble.

Has anybody come up with any other schemes? What do you all think would be the least confusing option? It would be useful I think to have some kind of standardisation.

With Best Wishes,
Julian
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Re: HW4 & Launchpad Button LEDs

PostWed Jun 15, 2011 6:35 pm

Julian,
Most helpful, I'm going to start my TPO layout for 4 Launchpads using your ideas, with minor mods. I especially like the idea of the round buttons for couplers. I had thought of them for program functions, transpose, set, etc. I really like the coupler idea. The nice part of the LP is all the possibilities.

Martin,

Would it be possible to select a group of LP buttons to become pistons? Then they could light up bright so you would have lighted pistons. I can envision two rows of buttons, 1-10, then pp mp mf f ff plus Cancel programmed in a lighted piston toggle fashion. That would really be awesome. For 15 Combinations and a Cancel, it would still be the correct number of buttons.

George (G3)
Owner/Builder of Hammond-Hauptwerks X-66 3-manual organ.
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