I am using the MC6 with up to 8 Midi pedals. So far I have programmed
several banks to achieve control of each individual pedal, and the MC6
is particularly nice with the Empress looper.
Now I was hoping that the MC6 would be a breakthrough for controlling
together multiple pedals, but it seems very limited, unless I am missing
something.
What I did was to program each multi-pedal preset so that it engages
several pedals in pos1, sends a couple of CC and PC to those pedals, and
then bypasses all of them in pos2. This works for sure, however with 3 to 4
messages required per pedal and only 16 available messages on the MC6, one
can barely control 4 pedals at the same time.
In fact the number of controllable pedals is closer to 3 in practice. Indeed,
one also needs to add a bypass message to any pedal that is not used in the
current preset, in order to make sure that no unwanted pedal will remain active
when directly switching from another preset or bank.
Some kind of macros would help here. For instance defining a Preset whose
purpose is to disable all pedals, and that could be called from another preset.
I've seen in the Suggestion forum that many people have requested macros for
similar purposes. Hoping such solution will come some day...
Thanks for submitting the suggestion!
I only use the MC6 with a HX Stomp so the exercise was purely academic :)
After thinking about how the loopback functionality might be implemented internally I submitted the following suggestion
https://www.morningstarfx.com/forum/suggestions-and-bug-reports/suggestion-accessing-presets-as-macros-using-a-virtual-channel
Thanks!!! That's a nice idea, a bit cumbersome indeed, but I just checked that it works,
without midi thru of course ;-)
It would great to have in the Editor an action "trigger preset A in Bank B" (avoiding such
a midi loop), as a simple way to build macros in a dedicated bank.
What's your personal method for presets with multiple pedals? Another solution would be
to give up bypassing all pedals in pos2. I could just engage the required pedals in pos1,
and bypass only the unused ones in pos1. Of course, I loose the ability to bypass all pedals
at once, but this should be a bug-free method.
This is very Rube Goldberg but from the limited testing I’ve done I believe it will work.
The basic idea is to loop the midi out to midi in on the MC6. To get it to work with your pedals you will need to y-split the out cable so that it can provide input to your pedals as well as input to the MC6. In my test I looped the midi cable from the MC6‘s output to its input. I used channel 1 for MC6 input.
The documentation for the MC6 Midi Implementation allows CCs 10-21 to address individual presets in a bank. For simplicity in my test I used CCs 16 & 17, i.e. presets on the second page. On the first page the configuration for preset A which was set to toggle at the preset level was as follows:
Msg1 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=16, Val=1, Pos=1
Msg2 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=17, Val=1, Pos=1
Msg3 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=16, Val=2, Pos=2
Msg4 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=17, Val=2, Pos=2
Presets G & H, i.e 16 & 17, were configured as follows (the types and values are meaningless, I just wanted to confirm the messages were being sent which I did by using the editor’s midi monitor.)
Preset G:
Msg1 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=1, Val=10, Channel=2
Msg2 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=2, Val=11, Channel=3
Msg3 Action=Release, Type=CC, CC=3, Val=12, Channel=2
Msg4 Action=Release, Type=CC, CC=4, Val=13, Channel=3
Preset H:
Msg1 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=10, Val=20, Channel=4
Msg2 Action=Press, Type=CC, CC=11, Val=21, Channel=5
Msg3 Action=Release, Type=CC, CC=12, Val=22, Channel=4
Msg4 Action=Release, Type=CC, CC=13, Val=23, Channel=5
Triggering preset A generated the following messages in the midi monitor -
Type CC, CC=1, val=10
Type CC, CC=2, val=11
Type CC, CC=10, val=20
Type CC, CC=11, val=21
Triggering preset A again (i.e. toggling) generated the following messages -
Type CC, CC=3, val=12
Type CC, CC=4, val=13
Type CC, CC=12, val=22
Type CC, CC=13, val=23
Note in presets G & H not to use channel 1. To summarize, you can use 1 preset to control multiple other presets and in the process give yourself access to many more messages.