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Wireless midi control of helix thru Forscore!


ichasedx
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Hello to all,

  I'm sorry if this has been covered already, I searched the archives and haven't found anything..

I have recently made a new pedalboard including the Helix and several pedals controlled via MIDI. Also I abandoned paper sheet music and purchased a new iPad 12.9 and a page turner. I have been using Forscore app for the music. I have seen several devices on Youtube for controlling the Helix wirelessly.

 I was wondering if the people that use the iPad as I am looking to do, have any comments or suggestions, good or bad, about letting Forscore control your snapshots. I have heard of peoples complaints that if they page in the wrong direction that it can be frustrating as their presets have changed as well.

One last question, can the wireless midi controller be placed in series within my MIDI loop?

Thanks as always

Mike

 

 

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I pretty much control all my stage elements including the Helix via MIDI, but not wireless MIDI.  I use a traditional MIDI controller that works with my Ableton Live on the laptop, my Helix and several other MIDI interfaces such as lights or other footpedals either through USB or traditional 5 pin MIDI.  It all works flawlessly and has for a couple of years now.  For me it's no real issue not being wireless as it's all pretty much prewired on my pedalboard with just two USB connections to my laptop so it's not a pain for setup or tear down.  There's a couple of real MIDI gurus on here that will hopefully chime in on the wireless MIDI market capabilities.

As far as controlling the Helix via MIDI it's about as simple as it can be, but I have my MIDI controls setup on a song by song basis, so when I change MIDI banks on my controller it automatically syncs all other devices including the Helix preset to be aligned with that song, and my MIDI functions are specifically defined for what needs to be done within that song.  But I use a Morningstar MC8 MIDI controller to control everything because it works flawlessly, is very powerful and is easy to program and setup.  It sounds like you want to use your Forscore app as the controller which may work fine, but I initially started out using the Helix as my controller and quickly ran into a number of challenges because the implementation wasn't as robust and flexible as a dedicated MIDI controller.  This is especially true when you want a single control action on your controller to execute a series of of different MIDI commands to different devices.  I'd say look very carefully at what MIDI control capabilities Forscore provides to ensure it can work smoothly across all the devices that you want to control.

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Actually there was one more thing I wanted to add to the conversation. Now that I have a good understanding of MIDI programming, I also have a JTV-59. I try to think of all the possibilities of different combinations of "what controls what?". My head starts to spin!  It's like , I can control any parameter with any number of different knobs, switches, etc. I can control the page turn on Forscore via JTM, then Forscore would control the preset/snapshot which would then control the JTM settings! Thats just one!!!! Any suggestions on do's or don'ts when trying to find the most efficient way of incorporating everything?

Thanks again.

 

 

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On 4/20/2022 at 8:55 AM, ichasedx said:

Any suggestions on do's or don'ts when trying to find the most efficient way of incorporating everything?

Keep it as simple as possible - if for no other reason than to make ease toruble shooting easier.

 

I use the yamaha bluetoon midi (MD-BT01) to conect to an ipad or android tablet tablet and use bandhelper to display lyrics and change patches on the Helix. The patches and snapshots control my variax model and tuning, and in limited cases initial volume settings on the variax. That allows me to troubleshoot variax control issues purely via the Helix and patch control issues between the tablet and Helix. But I don't want or need multiway control.

 

My use of midi has been scant, so simple issues like moving from the tablet to the ipad, with the same software and finding patches weren't changing on the helix took quite a while to troubleshoot. Mainly as I only touch midi as required and have to relearn things. It took me ages to realise I had made a setting in the setlist view I use on the tablet to allow it to send midi changes, and that the ipad had to have its view set up independently (even though it looked like the same view to me).

 

If you're more confident with midi and use it regularly, clearly your expeience will be different.

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