Rob the Fiddler

I bought a Midibuddy a year or so back on ebay with the intention of using it to trigger loops in Ableton. I had hoped it was as easy as plug-n-play but no such luck.

I gave it another try last night and after banging my head against the wall I finally figured it out.

The problem is that need the midi buddy only sends out song selects and program changes. These are not suitable to trigger scenes in Ableton. The solution is to use the free programs Midi OX and Midi Yoke.

The instructions are a little on the lean side but once I figured it out, it all made sense.

First you need to install midi yoke. This is basically a virtual patch bay. Next you install the Midi OX.

This program allows you to capture Midi info and filter/modify it to your liking. In my case, I needed to convert the Program changes to CC messages. Some care needs to be done there too though because to get the toggle to work, you need to set the value to something high too like 99 or else ableton seems to ignore the message. It makes sense. For example, on the MAudio O2, if you want the control buttons to trigger a scene, you need to program the board to send something like 99…otherwise it just sends 0 and increments.

Here are some snapshots of what I did.

After the yoke is installed, you pick the midi input from the soundcard or USB (an Uno in my case) and send the output to the Yoke. I sent it to 3.

The mapping was done like this.

Basically it says grab all the Prg Changes and send them as Ctrl messages on channel 2. Send a value of 99 all the time. This worked for me.

Now on Ableton just take the input as yoke 3.

From there, you sends should be heard from Ableton and it can learn in Midi Mapping mode.