Ways to control the Duo on stage

Hello @Tarrasque73,

I would suggest you to make a pedalboard with all used plugins and use pedalboard presets according to the wiki here
In the section about saving and loading pedalboard presets
you can assign such presets to a switch on the Mod Duo.
I am changing reverb presets and wah on/off state at once within one pedalboard using different presets.
With this I mean the presets button in the GUI that I assign to a switch or the knob.

I know, this costs time upfront to prepare for a number of songs looking for the right plugin presets to be chosen for a particular song, but it should be no problem improving it.

Maybe you can simplify your pedalboards first, meaning following:

  1. Giving abbreviated names for song presets like
    SongA_Intro, SongA_V1, SongA_Ch1, SongA_Solo
    for Intro, Verse, Chorus, Solo
    2.Reducing your plugins of the same type ( gates, distortions, compressors, amps, time based effects and reverbs) to a list of preferred plugins and presets.
  2. Creating pedalboards for one or more songs and creating pedalboard presets like under 1 where you decide which plugin ( and plugin preset) is turned on.
  3. Choosing a knob or switch on your Mod Duo for your pedalboard presets to choose from.

Hint: If I just switch between verse and chorus I I like to name both presets as follows:
SongA->Chorus (for the verse)
SongA->Verse (for the chorus)
to show what’s next.

Greetings and God bless, Marius

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The real problem is that a list assigned to a footswich will, if I am not mistaken, cycle with each click, while I need “random” access.

I often have 3 or more sounds per song, and they are not used in sequence.I have to be able to jump back and forth to one sound to the other.

Hi @Tarrasque73,

I know your concern, and if the overall form of the song will be the same like
Intro, V1, C1;Interlude,V2, C2, Solo, Pre-Chorus, V3, V1,
there is only the next pedalboard preset available and unfortunately you have to make an entry in the list for each part…

How can we fix this is the question because sometimes this exact order may be too unflexible.
You want to make music, not fiddling with presets if it’s just one song or a numberof songs with one pedalboard.

I hope someone will chime in here with a proposal for better management…

Greetings and God bless, Marius

I think the only viable solution to be able to select entries from a list by using PC or CC messages as “item index” exactly as is now possible for pedalboards in a bank.

This way you could use any of the available commercial MIDI pedalboards to either switch pedalboards in a bank or presets in a pedalboards, to fit your liking.

If you could also choose the MIDI channel for each of these control methods you could even use both at the same time!

But maybe this would be a little overkill. I figure that if someone used my approach to use one pedalboard per song, then he could be content with changing pedalboard with the MOD buttons.

Ah sorry I should have forseen that. You need some mapping files for osc2midi to run, you can create your own and pass it in as a parameter with the -m flag. If one is not specified it looks for it in the path reported in the error. You can copy this folder https://github.com/ssj71/OSC2MIDI/tree/master/maps to that directory and it should start with the default map.

Ok, sorry, now my problem is that i can’t create the folder /usr/local/share/osc2midi/ because I don’t have permissions (filesystem is read-only and i can’t change permissions with chmod). Is there a solution you can suggest?

~/.config/osc2midi/
Will also work. Copy them there.

Thank you for patience. Now it seems to works, I mean, it says:

starting osc server on port 57120
sending osc messages to address osc.udp://localhost:8000

Fantastic. But now… how can I communicate with?
My phone is connected to the Duo through bluethoot. Wich is the host adress to set in my OSC app?
And through wich virtual midi port can I communicate with plugins?
:thinking:

now we get to the fun part. :grimacing: I haven’t done this myself.
You should see a new midi port appear in the pedalboard builder. Does that show up?

The next step would be to use an app like control osc+midi to send some osc messages to 192.168.51.1:57120

if you run osc2midi with the -v flag it will print a message when it receives an OSC message.

Lets try to get to that point, then we’ll figure out midi learn etc. If I have some time tonight/soon I’ll see if I can do this at home, then I can make a better tutorial.

Unfortunatly it doesn’t seems to work.

  • Scanning for midi ports in MOD Web GUI doesn’t find any new port.
  • osc2midi (-v) doesn’t receive any message while my OSC app is connected to 192.168.51.1:57120 (or even 192.168.50.1:57120)
    Let me know if you find a solution.

Sorry if I get back to this topic again (an please let me know if it deserves it’s own discussion), but it’s very important to me.

Just to explain better where I’m coming from, my use case is that of the on stage live guitarist. We have lots of different songs in our set. Setlists may change at the last minute or even during the act. Order rearranged, songs skipped, extra songs added at the last minute because someone from the audience wants to sing his favourite…

Thus, there’s no way I can make a “sequential” sound list. All sounds must be recalled directly, and they MUST be recalled by pedal clicking. Crouching to fiddle with the knobs should be limited to the bare minimum on stage. Even the DUO tuner is completely useless to me, since it requires me to long press the right knob…

This is where the pedalboard presets come dear to me. They are a wonderful way to make different sounds, and switching from one to the other does not incur in the lag that switching between pedalboards requires.

Unfortunately they must be MIDI controlled in order to be useful to me…

I think it shouldn’t be too hard to implement. It’s quite similar to the already existing mechanism for switching pedalboards in a bank with MIDI PC messages.

All it takes is to assign a different MIDI channel for presets.

Isn’t anybody else interested in this?

Hello @Tarrasque73,
I know what you mean and want, but the solution might not be so easy you think.
Maybe the solution might involve another and better use of the two Mod Duo displays showing Song List and presets, whether there are plugin preset names or pedalboard preset names involved.
Let me be a bit philosophical first regarding list control:

MIDI PC messages are 7bit meaning there are
128 different assigned cells in a memory list (or an array of 3 if this list links to a corresponding long name (showing on the browser GUI) and an abbreviated short name (showing on the Mod Duo display). Think of it like this

  • ‘‘Duo cryptic unique memory’’ or special unique song part preset n
    [Friendly patch name] (ambient Toolbox)
    'Friendly short name ambnt

or anything I mentioned before regarding song list improvement.

Filling this list is straightforward, but how should updating or deleting presets be handled? What if I select an inexistent preset? What if I want to rearrange the array/list because there are too few or much entries? Shall we consider n amount of empty preset spaces between song indexes m beforehand? What if a preset n is used by song m1,m3,m15,m17?

You may use some or all MIDI channels for sending preset changes, but I think it’s hard to implement.
Even if you use a dedicated MIDI controller like the Korg nanokontrol switching dedicated plugin presets with the 3 (Solo,Mute,Record) buttons (for previous plugin preset, next plugin preset and engage plugin) and the slider for changing a dedicated parameter.

Since you want to use just the two Mod Duo switches and MIDI messages,our programmers have to implement a good way showing banks and presets and switching within them or handling MIDI messages in an easier, faster way.
If someone like @Tarrasque73 just uses the Mod Duo like a preset switching board but with a long list of presets, we need a solution.
I would like to see how our brainstorming headquarters will handle this…

Thanks in advance and God bless, Marius

Yes, definitely. I’ve seen a number of users request the ability to map individual pedalboard presets to an actuator (button).

According to this message Single button toggle between CC values there should be an upcoming release that addresses this. In my opinion better MIDI mapping and full master/slave MIDI support are two primary aspects that would keep the Duo comparable to other devices like the Headrush Pedalboard or the Boss GT-1000

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@Guido what OSC app are you using? I just installed “OSC Controller” by Adam Katz on the google play store. The sliders work with the default map of osc2midi. I connected the bluetooth and put in the app ip address 192.168.50.1 port 57120 and removed the default oscpath and clicked start. Once thats done I can see the messages come through when I ran osc2midi -v in an ssh terminal.

The next step is connecting the osc2midi output to the mod-host midi input. I ran jack_connect osc2midi:midi_out mod-host:midi_in to connect the midi out of the osc2midi converter to the mod-host. But I’m not confident it worked. jack_lsp -c doesn’t show them as connected. When I try to do midi learn though, it doesn’t seem to be working. I haven’t used the midi learn much on mod before, so maybe I was doing something wrong, but I’m confident that I at least was generating midi messages on the duo. I didn’t set up starting osc2midi and the jack_connect calls in a startup script, that might help. We might need some insight from the mod-team about how to get the midi learn working from the command line (if possible).

Yes, definitely. I’ve seen a number of users request the ability to map individual pedalboard presets to an actuator (button).

Glad to see I’m not the only white fly. :slight_smile:

According to this message Single button toggle between CC values there should be an upcoming release that addresses this. In my opinion better MIDI mapping and full master/slave MIDI support are two primary aspects that would keep the Duo comparable to other devices like the Headrush Pedalboard or the Boss GT-1000

Yes, that post really got me excited! Can’t wait for release 1.7!

I agree with you, the insufficient MIDI capabilities are at the moment the biggest flaw of the Duo for a proper on-stage use.

Being able to select pedalboards AND pedalboard presets via footswitches is what would really onlock the power of the device for a guitar player.

Filling this list is straightforward, but how should updating or deleting presets be handled? What if I select an inexistent preset? What if I want to rearrange the array/list because there are too few or much entries? Shall we consider n amount of empty preset spaces between song indexes m beforehand? What if a preset n is used by song m1,m3,m15,m17?

I guess the mechanism would be analogous to the list of the pedalboards in a bank.

I haven’t actually tried it yet, but I guess the “bank” is actually an one dimensional array of pedalboards, so if you send PC 1 you get the first and so on.

So if you rearrange the pedalboards in the bank you also must change the configuration of your MIDI controller to match.

It’s not something guitarists are not used to, any way. With old school rack effects unit, it was part of the daily workflow. :wink:

You may use some or all MIDI channels for sending preset changes, but I think it’s hard to implement.
Even if you use a dedicated MIDI controller like the Korg nanokontrol switching dedicated plugin presets with the 3 (Solo,Mute,Record) buttons (for previous plugin preset, next plugin preset and engage plugin) and the slider for changing a dedicated parameter.

I’m afraid I’m still not getting the point straight. In the kind of user experience I’m trying to explain, there’s no place for parameter editing or plugin presets.

What matters is ONLY whole “patch” changes. You have the clean chorus sound for the verse and you go to the distorted delayed sound for the solo. And back.And you need to do it with a single pedal press, possibly with as little interruption of signal as possible (that’s why pedalboard changes with the duo are not ideal).

Since you want to use just the two Mod Duo switches and MIDI messages,our programmers have to implement a good way showing banks and presets and switching within them or handling MIDI messages in an easier, faster way.

To be honest, the 2 switches on the duo are nearly useless in my scenario. Once you can pilot the Duo fully with a MIDI pedalboard, there isn’t a good reason to use them.

Well now that I think, if I had fully random access to presets in a pedalboard with a MIDI footswitch, I could revert to switching pedalboards in a bank with the Duo switches, since in this scenario pedalboard switching should be limited to the time between songs, and pedalboard number would be reduced by much, but this is a secondary consideration that just came to me.

A better way of showing bank and pedalboard info on the Duo display is another matter entirely, but now that you mention it, is another thing that bothers me and, frankly, another evidence that use of the Duo outside a studio has been severely overlooked.

Unless I’m mistaken, there’s no place you can see the current pedalboard name (let alone bank and pedalboard preset) anywhere on the display if you have plugin parameters mapped to the Duo footswitches.

You can ONLY see them in the web pedalboard builder.

This is complete nonsense!!! I won’t have a laptop connected to the Duo onstage!!!

I can happily live without bank info, but I really think that pedalboard name and pedalboard preset should be always visible on the displays

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Thanks lots for trying help me, ssj71. Unfortunatly what you describe doesn’t work on my system.

I have tryed several OSC app, on both osx and android phones, nothing seems to work. Finally i’ve installed TouchOSC that seems to be a very good app: connection seems to be properly set, but even in this case osc2midi -v doesn’t show any message.

When I try to do this connection MOD’s cpu consumption grow up to 100% and I have lots ov XRUNS, 'till I kill osc2midi.

Which could be my mistake?

I have the exact same result. I don’t understand it. I made a new thread to try to discuss this with the mod devs. OSC on the Mod (or why mod-host doesn't like my midi port)

I have tryed several OSC app, on both osx and android phones, nothing seems to work. Finally i’ve installed TouchOSC that seems to be a very good app: connection seems to be properly set, but even in this case osc2midi -v doesn’t show any message.

I suspect that they are not matching the mapping file. Have you looked at the documentation of osc2midi at all? Because OSC is such a broad and flexible standard without a common implementation, each app does it a little differently. You just need to make a .omm map file for your app. You can see all the OSC messages received if you run osc2midi -mon the -v just prints the matches made, -mon monitors/prints all received messages. I’ve been successful for sending OSC over bluetooth and over the usb from my laptop. Keep in mind that with android you should disable your other networks (mobile data, wifi, just like if you are using the pedal builder webUI). Also the IP address for a wired connection is 192.168.51.1 and the bluetooth is 192.168.50.1. See if you can get anything through.

p.s. this thread is getting really messy maybe we should start a new one

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I started experimenting with my old Zoom 8050 foot controller that I still had laying around.

For those not around in the early nineties, the 9050 is the companion foot controller of the classic Zoom 9030 rack effect processor, but quite capable of working stand alone, having regular DIN MIDI cable connectors.

The pedal layout is classic enough. It has BANK UP and BANK down footswitches, one BYPASS switch (that on the original effect processor bypasses alleffects, but since in the end it only outputs a CC message can be used for anything), one GROUP switch which I’ll explain later, and 5 numbered switches.

Selecting a patch is done this way: The BANK switches set the “tens” digit on the display. Then by clicking one of the numbered footswitches you add the “unit” and output the corresponding PC message. The GROUP switch works as a “shift” key. When red numbered footswich output 1 to 5. When green they output 6 to 10. Clicking the GROUP switch alternates from red to green. The PC message is output only when clicking the numbered footswitches so you can prepare in advance the next patch by setting banks and group without interrupting the sound.

What makes this pedalboard most interesting is that it had an “extended mode” switch that allows the GROUP switch to cycle through an addinional yellow state that puts the numbered switches in CC mode.

When the GROUP switch is yellow, every one of the 5 numbered switches outputs a programmable CC message which can be configured in a number of ways, such as latched, unlatched, oscillating (more a sawtooth actually but still very useful), even tap tempo.

This boils down to the fact that you can effectively use it to select pedalboards AND within a pedalboard change to extended mode use the 5 switches to operate the plugins with MIDI learn!

Since the pedalboard can be easily found on ebay or other used gear shops for a small price, I really reccomend it.

EDIT: I forgot it also has 2 plugs for external expression pedals, that can be configured to output a CC message, so you also have that, too.

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Hi guys. I planning use the mod duo live. Do you know if I can change the pedalboards with the duo connected to the editor with bluetooth or usb? I can change snapshots via chocolate footswitch while I’m connected, but it has no sense we cannot change pedalboards.
Someone can help me?