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Looper's Delight
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so I picked mine up today, and before I'd even got it home, the veil had been lifted....
basically, in the context of talking to (say) a repeater, the thing is the wrong tool. it's probably great for a fender cyber-twin, and I'll end up either selling mine or using it with one of my pod things.
if I've got any of this wrong, please flame away. but flame behringer too. the manual's crap, and I'm a broadcast engineer and midi-musician of twenty years standing.
how it works... what it does.... the footswitches are only ever used to recall or edit a preset. they can't be used to send individual prog changes. so each preset is a snapshot, if you will, consisting of as many as five programme changes, two controller values and a note. also, the preset contains setup information for the two pedals, so that aswell as the controller number they drive, you can define minimum and maximum values for each pedal in each preset.
any of these items can be enabled or disabled for transmission when a preset is recalled, but you set the channels for each on a global basis.
for us loopers, this ain't much use: a state-change requiring either a single pc or cc to be sent would use up a whole preset. even the basic transport commands mean using two button-pushes and the total memory of the thing quickly disappears just for the basics of a repeater.
the tap-tempo/note transmission, which at first glance appears to be the responsibility of a footswitch that's out of reach for tapping (10/0) is actually done by repeatedly selecting the preset you're already on. that is, the note or controller value (depending how the remoted device implements tempo control) is sent when the preset is selected. so to send it again (which is how you'd use it for tap-tempo) you have to reselect the same preset on every eighth quarter-note or whatever. and.... this means that the snapshot controller values (not the pedal ones, the ones lurking uder footswitches 6 & 7) within that preset are also resent with each tap. so if you were to use the preset to establish a value for a controller that you then changed using one of the pedals or something else, tap-tempo would reset it for you. not clever. in fact, you lose one of the preset's controller values to the tap-tempo function anyway, if it's implemented using a cc on the box you're driving, so they tell you to disable it. and if you're using preset 7 (say), that's the button you have to tap. mad, isn't it?
does anyone know of a better foot controller than this? I'm going to fetch a soldering iron to my pc1600 and add footswitches and pedals to it. I might even just gut the behringer and use it's switchgear as a remote for the peavey. or just get a bunch of footswitches and pedals and remote the whole front panel of the repeater. the warranty isn't valid anymore anyway.
for the record, the peavey pc1600 is a bit more expensive, but it has 100 presets and 100 scenes that aren't necessarily tied to the presets. each preset holds setup strings analogous to the behringer's presets IN ADDITION TO THE FRONT PANEL CONTROLS; again, these aren't tied to what the 16 faders and 16 pushbuttons are set up to do, and can be an enormous string of cc's, pc's, notes, rpn's, nrpn's or meaningless hex- the choice is yours.
the buttons can send notes, pc's, strings, strings wih a value defined by the faders... they can mute the faders... they can toggle between two states or be one-hits. the faders can send cc's, note numbers, strings... they can be limited, they can work upside down... two sockets on the back allow the connection of either two expression pedals (in addition to, not replacing any of the 16 faders) or one pedal and two momentary footswitches (again, adding to the buttons on the front and similarly flexible).
all of this can be programmed from the front panel, sans computer, and you don't need to understand midi unless you want to go beyond cc's and pc's. and you get to name y'r presets. good copying functions, and it will learn from a connected device in case you were wondering how to find out a cc or nrpn number- no need. midi filtering/merging. remote preset/scene recall.
I set a button up on mine to send a fixed-velocity note on, with the note number defined by the adjacent fader. releasing the button would send an all-notes off on that channel. what a noise!
all this was on the version I bought six years ago. they make a better one now. if only it was pedals.
duncan.
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