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Looper's Delight
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I just received a Novation Launchpad and thought some of you
might be interested in some technical details. It works fine with Live, I won't go into detail on that
since I'm more interested in using it with other applications, but if I
were a heavy Live user I would definitely get one. It speaks normal MIDI so with some work it can be used with
other applications. If you have Novation's Automap utility
you can do some basic mapping of pads to plugin parameters but to get the
most out of it you will need to write code or Max/MSP patches to control
it. It's about 10 inches square and 1/2 inch thick. Build
quality is okay, the case is plastic but it feels solid enough.
If you dropped it it would probably survive. It has to sit on a
table, there is no stand socket on the bottom. The pads are smaller than on most drum pad controllers like
the Trigger Finger, less than an inch square. They are not
velocity sensitive which makes this of limited use as a drum
controller. Pressing a pad produces a soft "click" that you
can feel but not hear. This let's you know the button has been engaged but I found
it slightly annoying. The pictures and most of the videos make it look like the
default state of the buttons are bright white but they're not.
When a button is off, it has a slightly translucent dull grey color which
is not that bad but not nearly as pretty as it looks in
pictures. Under each pad are two LEDs one green and one red. These can be
set to one of three shades (low, medium, and high) and combined to produce
shades of yellow and orange. They don't do white. In theory you have 16 shades available for each button (4
states squared). In practice many of the shades that combine
red and green are so slightly different that they can't be used as static indicators. You can use them to show
"movement" by cycling through the shades, you'll see the difference when they
change. But for buttons that just glow one color it's hard to tell the
difference between "Red Low + Green Low" and "Red Low +
Green Medium". Also there is variance in the brightness of the leds from pad to
pad so when combining them to make yellow it looks quite
"splotchy", some are very yellow and others look like pale green. So in practice I found around 6 or 7 really distinct shades
that could be used as static indicators. The rest could be used
to make pulsating lightshows like the Kaoss pad. Overall I was
a bit disappointed in the colors, it is not as pretty as the
videos or the picture on the box, but hey the price is still reasonable. It is not programmable. It only sends a fixed set of
MIDI notes for each pad and CC's for the buttons along the top. All
are on channel 1 and this cannot be changed. So if you want to combine
this with MIDI from another source, say an FCB1010, you'll have to
reprogram the FCB to send on a different channel, or do channel mapping in
software. The videos make it look like it has "pages" for
example in Mixer mode there is a page for volume control, one for pan, etc.
This is all done in Live. The Launchpad itself doesn't change what
notes the pads send when you select page buttons, the application has to
watch for the page buttons and dynamically change note mappings to do
different things. For example, in the demo for controlling track levels, each
column of pads acts like a "fader". The pads light up
from the bottom to whatever pad you press, press the top pad and the fader is
all the way up, press a pad in the center and the fader is around
halfway up, etc. The hardware is not magically converting this into CC7 for
the application, it's just sending notes and it is up to the
application to respond to them and turn the other lights in the column
on or off. This is why with Automap you can't do much with
this besides trigger things. There are no knobs and the virtual
faders are a trick supported only by Live. So in summary, if you're a Max hacker or write your own
applications, it is possible to do everything Live does and more but it
will take some work. This will work well for controlling
Mobius since the architecture is fairly close to Live. But the fun
part will be making pulsating light shows :) Jeff |