Designing a MIDI control surface (A Preramble)

As you may know I’m a VJ (that’s like a DJ who mixes video not audio). I use Arkaos GrandVJ to play live and I’ve been using an Akai APC40 Mk I for years as a controller to trigger, mix and adjust clips and effects. It’s a really solid piece of kit, well built, easy to use, but it’s become increasingly flaky in the last few years, and that’s not something you want when you’re about to go on stage.

Now that could be because of OS or software updates and nothing to do with the controller at all, but the APC40 is a black box and I have no idea what goes on inside that box – when it works it’s great, if it doesn’t I have no way of knowing what to do. It’s also has hard wired MIDI note assignments that can’t be changed. Well that last isn’t stricktly true. The APC40 is designed to be used with Ableton Live and you can remap the controls using Ableton, but if you open Ableton all hell breaks lose with the APC40 and it starts doing exactly what it should to work with Ableton and not what it was doing when being used for GrandVJ. And continues to do so when you close Ableton and fire up what you want to work with.

Imagine you have someone important coming round for dinner and you want to impress them. You get in the kitchen and prep all the ingredients but find the oven won’t light. You scratch your head for a bit and then find the oven works, but only if you start the washing machine first. Then you realise that, after you’ve turned off the washing machine because it’s noisy and you only needed it to start the oven, that the hob now uses the main oven controls and vice versa, the temperature readout is in fahrenheit rather than centigrade and you can’t turn the grill off at all. Sure you can still cook dinner but it’s not ideal to put it mildly. The next time you go to cook, the oven works fine, the time after that the hob doesn’t work but everything else is fine and you didn’t need to turn on the washing machine.

‘It works’ is great. ‘It’s broken but consistently so’ is OK. ‘I have no idea what might happen when I switch all this on but I have a whole pile of workarounds that might fix it’ is really no fun at all.

I looked for a new control surface for a long time, but as every one that’s available on the market is designed for music there’s always a compromise involved in the available functions. Too few drum pads (repurposed to launch clips), too few potentiometers or encoders (to change effects parameters and whatnot), no faders (I mix with eight channels of video running most of the time). I thought about the APC40 Mk II but thought I might run into exactly the same problems I’m having with the Mk I and like on the Mk I there are a lot of extra buttons I don’t need – it’s also quite expensive.

So, I want a control surface that works, and I’d like to know how it works. It should have:

  • The controls I need to run eight channels of video
  • Enough buttons to trigger a decent amount of clips without paging.
  • Enough pots/encoders for effects and parameter tweaking.
  • MIDI mapping options.

I’d also like to expand my live work to include audio (using VCV Rack, an open-source virtual modular synthesizer), so it would be nice to be able to do both audio and video at the same time with the same control surface. There isn’t such a control surface on the market (or at least not within my budget). If I’m that specific and there isn’t anything available maybe I should just make my own?

Yeah, like that’s possible…

And then I find out about OpenDeck and KiCad and have a Christmas holiday to do something about it. Of which more in an upcoming post.