Joining the discussion a little late and I will try not to repeat what has already been said. In short, I am a current MOD Duo owner a the single thing that prevents the MOD for being truly useful for me: the pedalboard switching lag is unacceptable for live performance, board-wide presets do not yet exist, and having >10 parallel audio paths just to change a single parameter in an effect quickly explodes CPU-wise.
I recently bought a standard MIDI foot controller (FCB1010) which has 10 footswitches and two expression pedals. It seemed like it should give me a lot of flexibility as far as reconfiguring a single pedal-board using a single button press. However, if I have a pedalboard with ~10 effects, I cannot assign a single button to send a control message for each and every parameter on the board (limitation of this controller).
I see two simple (relatively-speaking) ways of getting out of this situation:
Implementing the board-wide presets feature and allowing immediate switching between presets using control-change / program change messages. One critical thing to remember is to include the bypass switch of pedals in these presets - they seem to not be included in the per-pedal presets.
Implementing some MIDI plugin that allows translating a single program/control change message into an arbitrary sequence of control change messages. I filed a bug requesting this: https://github.com/moddevices/mod-duo-issues/issues/54.
As far as visual feedback, if one of the MOD screens displayed the value of the currently selected preset, it would help, but as others have pointed out, we’re not going to do any paging during playing, and switching pedalboards within a bank between songs using the on-board buttons is perfectly acceptable.
Another problem I encountered is that I couldn’t figure out a way to explicitly assign a controller number to a parameter. “MIDI learn” sort of breaks when you have a single footswitch sending multiple control messages in sequence.
Last, some people might prefer individual footswitches on their controller to control the bypass of individual pedals on the board. This should be made possible too, again by having an ability to map a single control / program change into a “toggle”.
I cannot emphasize enough how much more valuable it would make the MOD for me. In fact, while there are definitely other things that can be improved, if I was given only one thing to request changing in the MOD it would be this. All the rest is nice-to-have at this point, simply because you’ve already done a pretty great job in all the other areas.
‘Pedalboard presets’ is something we have in the plans.
It’s definitely coming. Probably not for v1.0, but shortly after.
Although a MIDI plugin that transforms messages is already possible today, we cannot use it for MIDI learn/CC handling. The hw MIDI inputs are connected directly to the mod-host without going through any plugins.
Regarding pedalboard switching, very soon you’ll be able to use MIDI program messages.
It will navigate through the pedalboards within a bank, like we have in the hw controller right now, just using midi instead.
The 0.15.0 update allows to use MIDI CC to control toggle/bypass and trigger type parameters.
So you can set bypass/processing for a plugin now.
Thanks for the response.
(1) will likely solve the problem as long as:
Presets can be selected via MIDI (currently doesn’t seem to be
supported for pedal presets).
We add an option to treat messages (e.g. note on/off or control
change) as drivers for binary / trigger parameters so that MIDI
footswitches can be mapped to control things like bypass, looper
start/stop/reset, etc.
However, (2) opens the door for pretty much anything, including supporting
different MIDI controllers, sequencing parameter changes, etc. By a very
cursory look at the code (forgive me if this is a stupid suggestion), it
seems like it should be possible (at the mod-host level) to connect plugins
between the “ttymidi:MIDI_in” and the “client:midi_in” ports for any sort
of MIDI pre-processing.
At the GUI level, there can be an additional MIDI-out jack, which is where
the MIDI messages that control parameters go.
Do it make sense? Do you see the merit? If this end up being supported, I
would be happy to take a stab at writing a plugin that manages MIDI-driven
presets.
I like the idea in general, but not sure if simply showing an extra port would be a good idea…
The input of mod-host (which is used for midi learn/cc) is automatically connected to any midi devices you add.
Exposing that port will expose the midi-hw connection too, which I think might confuse users.
I’ll ask what the other team members think about this…
I´v been using the Mod Duo for a week, and I have a lot of things to ask/discuss/learn, but from now, the most important thing is: Control !! How to change effects, or pedalboards in live performances (as you mentioned above as “Pedalboard” and “Preset”). I´ll start from here, about A/B Switch box. The Switch itself, (A or B) cannot be mapped/controlled by “MIDI learn…” (MIDI CC), and that´s a huge limitation to make diffrent ways inside a Pedalboard. I know, a lot of plugins in a pedalboard, cause some CPU overload, but until now, at least for me, it´s the best way to change effects during live performances. As I mentioned, one option is change pedalboard from bank, but it´s complicated in live performances (at least for now, because the lag), but i´v been reading that the Mod Duo team is working on it. In diffrent solutions and ways to do that. Let´s wait, and of course, contribute with ideas and options.
Currently I am working on a loop-switcher plugin (similar to the carl martin octaswitch), I feel like this could be the solution that you are looking for.
Keep an eye out on the forum for the release, working on the GUI as we speak. (might take a while since it requires a non-standard layout).
That’s great news!
Yesterday I was working on a pedalboard and thinking exactly about that.
How nice would it be organizing groups of plugins into a switcher.
It’s great that you are excited about this plugin, would you mind checking out the forum post I just made, and making some suggestions for the features that it should include?
Hi jesseverhage !!
Really good news !! Thank you !!!
I saw your post about it, and asap I will give my answers and sugestions !!
Really thank´s for the great news !!
Juist wondering if the ‘load pedalboard using midi’ was ever implemented?
I’m using forscore on my iPad for my scores, and it is able to send à configurable midi (typically PC) Message to any device (in this case my MOD) when i open a specific score.
Since i typically only use 1 or 2 fx pedals per song i’m ok with the 2 built-in switches. However, i do have 1 pedalboard per song so if i could use my iPad to load the correct pedalboard that would be fantastic!
My main problem here is that it’s unclear what pedalboard (within a bank) is linked to what ‘program number’
I want to load a specific pedalboard for each song (still using Forscore on my ipad) but i dont know how to configure the program nr for a pedalboard, or how to find out wthat the program number for a pedalboard is.
‘Navigating trough’ the pedalboards is not an option since this is a relative operation and i need to load a specific pedalboard, not ‘skip to the next one’
I use an iPad with an Alesis IO Dock II that gives MIDI IN and MIDI Out to the iPad.
I then use a software called “Setlist Maker” on the iPad. This software displays the playlist and can send MIDI info to the DUO (and many other devices) when selecting a song. This selects the proper Pedalboard in my DUO for the selected song.
This setup has worked great for me for the last 6 months … Except the day when the iPad was directly in the sun while playing an outdoor concert and stopped working due to overheating … Lol !
Is it possible to use Midi for a virtual instrument while also having separate pedals affect inputs 1 and 2 for guitar?
And have it all come out of output 1?
Yes, there are no imposed limits on the use of inputs and outputs, be it midi or audio.
there is a limitation on the use of CV (coming in v1.9), but that is something separate.
(to be clear, output mode is CV or headphone. and input is CV or expression pedal)
I,
Same question as Thijs. I read in Mod duo user’s manual (page 20):* "In the top-center of the screen, under the bank name, you can choose how you want to navigate between the pedalboards of this bank when the MOD Duo is not connected to the PC, Mac or tablet. There are two options: using the MOD Duo footswitches or using MIDI program change messages".
But nothing appear “under the bak name” in the editor (Chrome).
Does it mean this option has been left?
Thanks
Thanks a lot!!
Your answer saves me a couple of hours -))
It works fine with KeithMc Millen soft step. (For the developers team): it would a good idea to change this topic, in the user manual.
Suggestion also for the developers team, due to the latency of pedalboards to load (that is not a problem by itself): to put a sign on the modduo indicating when the pedalboard is loaded and ready to play.