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Church Sound: MIDI Over Network Part 2—Ways To Apply It

Getting various tech elements to seamlessly talk with each other
This article is provided by ChurchTechArts.

Last time, I talked about how to set up a MIDI network in your tech booth (or anywhere else for that matter).

Today, let’s look at what can be done with it. Or, more correctly, I’ll tell you what I’m doing with it. Before we go any further, we should first talk about the structure of MIDI commands.

Channels, Notes, Values, Oh My!
The basic structure of a MIDI command is a Channel, a Note and a Value. There are 16 possible channels, 128 possible notes, and 128 values for each notes. Oddly, channels run from 1-16, while the notes and note values from from 0-127. Go figure.

In addition to Note-On, you can also specify Note-Off, Control Changes, Program Changes and a few other things that don’t concern us. For the most part, I use Note-On and Control Change.

To send commands to Reaper, my DAW for recording, I use CC’s, which are nice because they don’t require a value. I can send a Channel 1, CC 1 for example and Reaper drops a marker at the current location (handy for marking the start of the message—yes it’s sent from the Message snapshot).

That’s not a default, I assigned CC 1 in the Reaper shortcut menu. Most of the other apps respond to Note-On commands.

These are a few of the commands I’ve set up in Reaper. The list is practically endless…

Auto-Start The Walk Out Music
I’ve long had a dream that I could fire the walk out snapshot and music would automatically start playing from Mixxx (our DJ app that plays walk in/out music).

That dream is now a reality. I spent a few minutes configuring Mixx to listen for commands on MIDI channel 5. Because I can start the playback “Decks” with a MIDI command, I send one command that brings the crossfader over to Deck A, and another that starts Deck A.

All I have to do beforehand is load the song that I want to start into Deck A. I typically do that near the beginning of the message so I don’t forget.

I mentioned MIDI channel 5; we’ll talk about that in a little bit. Setting up those commands in Mixxx took a little effort, but I discovered the MIDI Learning Wizard in Mixxx that made it easy. What else can we do?

Once you set Mixxx up to listen to MIDI commands via your network setup, you can then run the learning wizard to assign commends to the controls you want to fire.

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