Pad Controllers in Live Performance / DJing

[willrjmarshall]

Hi guys,

So, I've recently decided to focus some serious effort/attention on adding more live elements to my Ableton DJ sets: starting by focusing on pad controllers and the various things they can do. I own an LPD8 (and will get a Maschine soon), so I'm currently playing around with the options available to me.

So I have two questions. Firstly: does anyone know how I can MIDI-control the Pad View Selector on Drum Racks? I have written a control script for my LPD8 so it always plays the bottom 8 visible pads: but I need to use my mouse or keyboard to scroll up and down to expose additional pads, which sucks.

The Pad View Selector is the vertical strip on the far right of this:

Secondly: does anyone have any clever ideas for using pad controllers? So far I have thought of:

• Triggering drum and one-shot samples
• As a keyboard-alternative for synths and other tonal instruments
• Using the pads as MIDI CC input for FX control: so velocity (and aftertouch on the Maschine) modulate FX intensity.
• Slicing up tracks/loops and using the pads to trigger them from different start points (unquantized with velocity mapped to volume)
• Launching dummy clips in gate mode. Velocity to modulate the parameters the clips effect, so the modulation range is controlled by velocity.

Does anyone have any additional ideas or guidance on using pads?

I'm not really familiar with MPCs or other historic examples where pads were used: so I'm struggling to draw a boundary between things that should be controlled by my APC40 Clip Launcher, and things that should be controlled by pads.

[BestLegsinHD]

right now i'm using the midi fighter to do almost the same thing. i have three seperate drum racks (because i didnt know how to make them scroll up and down lol). the top three buttons trigger different racks. it was a huge waste of cpu and kind of a brute force way to go.

i usually chop up some vocals/acapellas, have some one shot drum hits (mostly cymbals).

the last button on the midi fighter actually arms my midi track that has Effectrix on it. i configured some combos that i liked and mapped those to be triggered by the lower twelve pads.

im also interested in having some more ideas on what to do with pads. i currently just bought a Maschine from a DJtt member and would like to use it live.