Blue Cat‘s Axiom: Midi controlled bank select. How?

[CAW-Project]

Hi guys,
I own a ZOOM G9.2tt and would like to control program change. I already made 3 own presets and activated the control for
program change with the numbers in front of the banks.
My problem is that I can’t get higher than preset 128 and can’t “activate” my own presets. Is my controller too old or am I just stupid and didn’t see the right adjustment to get higher preset numbers to get there?

Chris

[Blue Cat Audio]

Most MIDI controllers for guitar are indeed not capable of sending bank select messages (what they call "banks" on these controllers are not actual MIDI banks but groups of 4 or 8 presets withing the 128 selectable programs).

So when using these controllers, you should just manually select a preset from your user bank with the mouse in Axiom (for example the first preset contained in your user bank folder). You will then be able to select up to 128 presets in your user bank (Axiom remembers the last selected bank in the preset menu).

Hope this helps!

[Gartzn]

Hi. Another similar question:

I managed to select presets the way I want with my midi controller in the standalone app. But what if I want to do the same when using the plugin inside a DAW? I'm using VST3 version inside Cubase Elements 10 and I can't make it work.

Thanks in advance!

[Blue Cat Audio]

When using the plug-in in a DAW, you just need to route the incoming MIDI events to the plug-in (they are received by the DAW using whatever MIDI input).

So in your case, just create a MIDI track in Cubase and assign its output to the Axiom plug-in. All MIDI events received by the track will be sent to the plug-in. You may need to activate input monitoring for this track if you want to control the plug-in in real time. You can also record the MIDI events sent by your controller while playing if you want to playback the track with the exact same preset changes.

[Tappistry]

Alright, so here's the real noob question:

What's the easiest way to set up preset changes with a Soft Step 2? And how to assign a pedal in either the pre or post chains to be bypassed or turned on with one of the buttons?

It appears that I can assign bank #s to each of the Soft Step buttons, but it isn't clear how to match them with various presets in Axiom.

[Blue Cat Audio]

In order to assign a button to a bypass for any slot, you should use the "MIDI CC" setting for the pedals you want to use (if I remember well, the "Toggle" program on the SoftStep just does that with all pedals). Then use MIDI learn in Axiom to assign each pedal to the corresponding bypass control.

For preset changes, you indeed need bank select and program change messages. By default the "Program" program on the softstep only sends program change messages. So you can select up to 128 programs in a single bank of Axiom (0 to 127). If you do not want to bother programming the softstep, you can just use this program and put all your presets in the same directory (a single bank). Make sure that you select a preset in this bank with the mouse first so that all upcoming program change messages actually select a preset in this bank. That's the easiest way to use it.

If you want to use bank selection as well, you need to assign two softstep controls to bank select increment end decrement. This will let you navigate Axiom folders (each folder has a bank number, as you can see in the presets menu when program change is active). This way you can access up to 128*128=16 384 presets... It should be enoug for a gig

[Tappistry]

Only 384?! I need more!

I'll get to work on this. Thanks for the quick tutorial.

[Blue Cat Audio]

16384

[Tappistry]

Oh ok, I guess that will do.

[Tappistry]

Ah, I found the MIDI Program Change toggle in the Preset menu. Now this makes WAY more sense. I guess I didn't notice it before.

Thanks very much.

[Blue Cat Audio]

And that's actually even more, because our plug-ins support both MSB and LSB bank messages, so if you combine them you can use 16384 banks.

So that's a total of more than 2 millions of presets that you can access via MIDI. Feel free to call us if you don't have enough

[Tappistry]

So let's say my current folder of favorite presets is labeled 005 in my list.

The Bank selection would be 005, and the first preset in that folder would be Program 000. Correct?

[Tappistry]

And that's actually even more, because our plug-ins support both MSB and LSB bank messages, so if you combine them you can use 16384 banks.

So that's a total of more than 2 millions of presets that you can access via MIDI. Feel free to call us if you don't have enough

[Blue Cat Audio]

So let's say my current folder of favorite presets is labeled 005 in my list.

The Bank selection would be 005, and the first preset in that folder would be Program 000. Correct?

Indeed!

[Tappistry]

And then, if i had an overdrive pedal on one of those presets I wanted to toggle:

Copy the same bank/program values for another button on the Soft Step
Set the button mode to "Toggle"
Assign an arbitrary MIDI CC number (that doesn't conflict with the expression pedal)

Done?