Newbie questions. A little help please!

Monome
1

Hi there. I’m looking at buying a Grid 128 with the main purpose of controlling and monitoring sequencers, which I have built on my Nord G2 synths. I have M4L running in Ableton, but I don’t have the actual Max creation software.

Essentially what I would like is to have the Grid send messages to Ableton when buttons are pressed and that Ableton will convert these messages to MIDI Note On/Off, where they can be recorded as MIDI clips and sent out of the computer via MIDI to the Nord G2s. These Note signals will control the G2 sequencers and the G2 will send two streams of MIDI back to the computer. The first stream (monitoring) will be telling Grid what lights should be signalling so that it can present and display the sequencers’ activities in a way that I chose. The second stream (melodies) will be send musical note on/off signals to Ableton where I can distribute them to various virtual instruments.

At the moment I have absolutely no idea how I would get Grid to communicate with the G2s via Ableton like this. Does anyone know of a M4L device that already exists that would allow me to allocate note on/off messages for Grid input and output activity? I have managed to do exactly this using just Push 2 without even needing M4L, and it works really well, but I would like a bigger grid than 8x8.

Thanks in advance if you can help me.

Cheers

2

you might like markeats http://www.markeats.com/sequencer/

but it’s likely going to be difficult to get exactly what you want without some software modification-- and this will be an adventure into making/designing your own systems. there will not be something out of the box that does what you want.

my suggestion is that if the push does what you want, i’d stick with it. figure out how to shift to steps 9-16, i’m sure someone at ableton has made a way to do this.

or if you want to dive into deep customization, monome is the right place.

3

Thanks for the tip; I’ll definitely check that out. I have already made a solution to easily switch to parts 9-16.

I think sooner or later I will have to bite the bullet and learn to program with something else, like Max. I was just hoping there might be an easy way to convert outgoing Grid signals to MIDI notes and incoming MIDI notes to Grid messages.

I’ll keep reading…