Hey there!
I’m trying to work my RC10-R looper pedal into my Hapax setup. It’s a 2 Track looper with an additional drum machine. It’s fairly well midi controllable, however, there are some oddities around it. For starters, it doesn’t respond to transport messages such as Start/Stop/Song Position. I managed to get it sync nicely by playing an automation track that fires a CC value on the first beat for „Rhythm Track Start“ which puts the looper (in its „sync mode“) in a properly time aligned state. So far so good!
Now there are certain things missing:
Stopping the looper: since it does not respond to Transport Stop, the pedal needs to be stopped manually. If there was a way to define one (or more) on-Stop CC on Hapax for a track (or even a clip), I could program the RC10-R to stop in sync by sending the „Rhythm Track Stop CC“.
Recording Loops: Recording sync aligned loops requires to hit „Loop Control“ within the right windows of the beat. If I could prepare one-shot clips on Hapax, with CC automation, I could set myself up to never mess up the loop length. The clips should be one shot, because otherwise I’ll end up in a cycle of loop&overdub until I manage to change the clip.
The same one-shot mechanism could be used to further control the looper, i.e. Mute, Undo, Delete, Track select etc… (see the „RC10-R Parameter Guide“ for all CC controllable functions).
What do you think, are these reasonable ideas/feature requests? Is there another way to achieve this level of control that I am missing?
Obviously the initial issue is the slightly weird choices of Midi control by Boss which seem to aim for Midi foot controllers, however having the Hapax as a center piece I’d rather not add a 8 button floor board. Controlling loop length is also something that I’d call a huge plus…
So I made some progress by means of programming an RK-002:
Start/Stop I have now translated to CCs in the cable. That works flawlessly, but requires an extra cable.
For Loop Control I wanted one-shot-clips (err…patterns). The closest we have on Hapax currently are Math conditionals „1st“ for notes. So I added a Note-To-CC mapping to my RK-002 and that works, too.
However, to properly align an e.g. 8-Bar loop, I need a Pattern with more than 8 bars; „Loop Start“ needs to be triggered before the first beat.
I currently solve this through:
Syncmode=Ptrn
a default Pattern length of 8 bars
a „Loop record“ Pattern with 16 bars and a note on 7:4 and 15:4, each with Math=1st
This does the trick, however it is quite a lengthy set up: I need to decide ~9 bars ahead of time that I want to record a loop.
I have a gut feeling, that I could achieve something more flexible by having an option to program Pattern follow ups; either by
adding that option to the pattern’s play-mode or by
adding midi control to pattern launch, so pattern 1 could have automation that triggers pattern 2.
I still need to come up with an algorithm for my use case, to see if such a feature would make sense…
Yet another update: what I needed for „Loop Start“ was to send a midi message before the first beat of a pattern. It turns out PC pre-send is exactly that
So now I added yet another RK-002 translation from PC to CC, use a PC for Loop Control to start looping, use a note on Beat 8:4 to stop looping and now Bob’s my uncle.
Incredibly hacky and I would still love to lose the need for the RK-002; however I got things rolling.
hmm… I have the RC-5 (same series, simpler version) and there it just works (start + midi clock sync)
However I do remember some other problem (I think it didn’t stop). I could check.
I did have to change something in config iirc, it’s been over a year since I did it.
It’s funny, they are the same series, but they have very different MIDI implementations.
The RC-5 has 8 fixed CC numbers that can be assigned to about 40 different functions. The RC10-R has about 10 functions that can have CC numbers freely assigned.
I assume, for the RC10-R the developers maybe couldn’t agree on the semantics of Transport start (start beat, start loop, start both?), and therefore came up with the CC only controls…well all speculation…
Does your RC-5 align loops to measures? From what I read it may not do that. Which sounds odd to me - why listen to Midi clock when the loops are not bound to it? Otherwise it sounds like a nice and small looper with Midi.
