LED Feedback for Controllers

Hi Again!!! Tonight is just full of questions!

Im looking to have LED feedback on my controller (A Behringer X-Touch Mini, and a Maschine Mikro II). But I have no idea how to go about doing that! Ive gotten it to work ... sort of, but I think I'm cheating. I've managed to turn on an LED by sending that buttons midi message back to it via the X-Touch's output port. But again, I feel like that is kind of cheating, and am not sure how that will actually affect what happens when that button is pressed. Not sure if Im making sense there.

I also have heard lots about using sysex to control LED's on devices, but... cannot sniff sysex from this device (the X-Touch Mini specifically. I haven't extensively tried this with the Maschine Mikro yet) and so have no idea what to send where. Ive put it through snoize MIDI Monitor, with no sysex messages showing up, and none showing up under Bome's Midi Capture function.

 

Anyway... I hope all of this is making some kind of sense, and that someone can help point me in the right direction. Thanks so much!!

 

Knowing what signals you want to send to the hardware is always a plus!  You can usually find midi implementation guides on your device manufacturer’s websites, but more often than not, it works exactly the way you intuitively guessed.  That’s one of the reasons we call it LED feedback – you’re feeding the signal back into the device.  Fortunately, this does not cause a feedback loop.  (what goes into your device is not sent back from your device automatically)

Additionally, you can often get different colors from the LEDs by changing the velocity of notes sent to the hardware.  Again, it depends on the device.

You won’t do any damage by sending notes or CCs to your hardware.  SysEx is another story.

There’s no common conventions like that w/ SysEx; it’s very specific to each device, and sending the wrong commands can have unpredictable results (to say the least).  Do not try to learn SysEx by experimenting blindly.

Gottca! Brilliant! Thanks so much for the help. So…. I would essentially have two translators? One to make the button do what I wanted it to, and another to light it up? … at its simplest?

I haven’t fully worked out what best practices are in BMT yet, but that sounds right. Depending on your intended interface, you might need a third translator to turn that LED off again, or to turn a different LED off, or whatever.

I have learned a great deal about the SysEx command stream for my BCF2000 by running the MIDI flow through MT Pro and using Mountain Utilities. I am trying to remap the mains fader from 4th of 5 levels of presets to the 1st when in Mackie Emulation mode. It sorta kinda working now, more to come…