Left front: ooen-control controller (in a 3D printed case) (https://kblivesolutions.github.io/open.control/)
Right front: Phanstasmal Force (https://www.tindie.com/products/distropolis/phantasmal-force-micro-midi-controller/), spray-painted orange.
Behind: MIDI Fighter Twister (more just for scale than to suggest it’s a boutique thing) on a 3D printed stand I found here, and spray-painted orange:. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4782849
I love these little controllers. They can do stuff I’ve not found on any other controller and are totally customisable so they end up being unique to your own style (although I’ve never owned a Push and reckon they probably have a lot of the same functions). I use Control Surface Studio to create scripts for them in Live - and that’s another thing that has totally changed how I use Ableton for mixing, but mainly performance. They’re also tiny so are easy to carry round in a laptop bag.
I’ve just realised in coming across like a salesman or something, haha! Anyway, along with a Launchpad MK2 this is basically a photo of my live “rig”.
Neat! What do you have the Phantasmal Force set up to do at the moment?
It’s a cool little box of tricks. At the moment I’ve got two presets that I jump between, one for new projects/mixing, the other for my performance project.
For performance it’s set up like this:
1st row - a row of group track selectors: (1) = Drums; (2) = Bass; (3) = Synths; (4) = FX and Vox. Once the group is selected, Banks 1 and 2 on the MIDI Fighter Twister (MFT) is scripted to have selected track control over the devices, sends, pan, volume etc. on the selected track.
2nd row - Button (1) controls the Touch Me Max device by Elzabeth Homeland - this is the only button in this preset that also uses the dial on the Phantasmal Force to send out MIDI CC data; button (2) toggles the floating windows of two Max device interfaces at the same time, Control Matrix by killhu and Inspector by AudioLord; (3) Selects a specific rack on a bass track in the Bass group which is controlled by Bank 3 on the MFT (filtering/distortion etc.) via the Control Matrix device; button (4) controls the Collapse All function in the GETOUTOFMYWAY device by Elizabeth Homeland so the project immediately collapses back to just showing the group tracks rather than all the tracks within them, which is great if I’ve unfolded any of the groups and have got lost in a world of clips on my Launchpad.
Bottom left 4 buttons (2x2 grid) controls this MFT Bank Changer device - no prizes for guessing what that does 😊
The bottom right 2x2 grid of buttons isn’t set in stone yet - the two right-most buttons on the third row aren’t programmed for anything yet although I have an idea what they’ll be used for; the very bottom right corner button is another track selector for a Portatron channel - this is constantly playing tape loops (which aren’t synced to Live’s BPM) over the whole set, but the channel fader is usually all the way down. I can jump straight to this track with the bottom right button then bring the fader up with the MFT to play a looped drone while I speed up the project BPM for the faster section of the set without it affecting the outputput of the Portatron.
The 3rd button on the bottom row is going to be hard to explain 🤣. I’ve basically taken the idea under the heading “A novel use for the crossfader” from this page on the pATCHES website but turbo-charged it. In the Drum group, I’ve set up several drum tracks playing loops and classic breaks, and use this button to switch between them, but instead of just using static fills on the B track like in the linked article, I’ve set up a multi-chained FX rack with different Permut8 banks on each chain. One encoder on the MFT controls the chain selector to jump between banks, and another encoder feeds MIDI notes into the Permut8 rack via a Potee device so as I twist the encoder it changes the current program. Between one botton and two dials I have full control over a couple of hundred giltch/pitch/stutter effectx than I can drop in and out of at will.
Blimey, that was a long post - sorry… Hopefully it makes sense - I’ve never thought about having to explain my setup before! (I’ve just realised I’ve not even covered the preset for mixing either - I guess that’s for another time, if anyone even cares. I use the dial on the Phantasmal Force much more in that preset - this one mainly just uses the buttons, except for the Touch Me device button which uses the dial too. The MFT does 99% of the twisty knob stuff in my performance set)
TLDR: buttons do stuff