APC40 Help with additional banks / modes

Hiya yesterday was my first day with MT Pro 1.7 beta for Mac OS X and I have made some very good progress but need help as I'm stuck with something.

I have used the SHIFT button on the APC to change BOME presets, I have 8 different presets or banks I can switch to by holding shift and pressing STOP CLIP buttons 1 through 8. My goal is to create something along the lines of the Native Kontrol Bome presets, however I want it customized to my taste with even more additional functions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4YIGfhb ... wXIUjxKKUo

So then on bank 1 I want the APC to function as normal but on all others 2-7 I want my own customized control.

Currently I've only worked on preset / bank 2 for which I've used BOME to create cursor keys on the APC I've even got them lighting up red, they flash when pressed and they scroll when held by utilizing Bome's repeat timers function.

The problem is when in Bome preset / bank 2 I don't want the APC40 to function in it's normal way at all, currently its still doing so. I have no idea of how to stop this behavior. In banks 2-7 I want all the CLIP LAUNCH buttons on the APC to stop launching Ableton clips and also to stop lighting up as if there is a clip on that button.

What I've done on bank 2 is very similar to 2:40 into that youtube video link I posted above. Notice how when he switches to this bank all the clip launch buttons on the APC stop lighting up as if clips are on the buttons. Instead they are only lit on buttons with functions he's added like cursor keys and zoom controls...etc

This is what I'm after but my lack of knowledge leaves me stuck at this point. Attached is my BOME Project so far.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Well I have figured it out, not sure if this is the most efficient way, maybe someone can chime in on that, but here's how I did it.

Firstly I made my banks 2 through 7 a complete blank slate so that all CLIP LAUNCH buttons would have LED's off and would swallow any MIDI command.

So I created a timer called BLANK BUTTON TIMER - KILL LED this timer was triggered to start upon activation of current BOME preset. It's an indefinite timer with a 1ms initial delay and a 50ms repeat delay. I use this same timer for every blank button.

After which for each CLIP LAUNCH button I wrote the following translators.

Note On #2 F3 (Corresponding CLIP LAUNCH Note On) Outgoing trigger - (BLANK NONE) Swallow
Note Off #2 F3 (Corresponding CLIP LAUNCH Note Off) Outgoing trigger - (BLANK NONE) Swallow
On Timer "BLANK BUTTON TIMER - KILL LED" Outgoing trigger - Note On #2 F3 vel 0

The first two lines just make sure all messages are swallowed so that the button no longer triggers the launching of clips in Ableton Live.
The third line utilizes the timer I created to send a message to kill the LED light every 50ms by sending the button a velocity 0 message.
So I repeated this step for every CLIP LAUNCH button and then copied them all across my banks 2 through 8. This gave me a blank slate.

MIDI SETUP

In Ableton I have selected Bome Virtual MIDI Port 1 as the IN & OUT interface for the APC40, so I did not select the standard USB2.0 APC40 as the MIDI in & out for the device. In Bome I routed APC40 In to MT Pro Virtual Out 1 and MT Pro Virtual In 1 to APC40 Out. I figure this way BOME acts a bridge and any APC40 MIDI goes through Bome first.

Being completely new to Bome and this kind of thing in general, I'm hoping someone can chime in about the above setup I used. Is this the right way to go about this? It seems to work.

SWITCHING BANKS

I have one always active preset, a Shift preset and presets titled Bank 1 through to 8

The always active preset simply activates the Shift preset whenever the APC40 SHIFT button is held. It also deactivates the Shift preset whenever you let go of SHIFT button on the APC40. I have set these commands to Swallow MIDI messages.

On the Shift preset I have mapped the APC's STOP CLIP buttons 1 through 8 to switch Bome presets to Banks 1 through 8. Again I have set all these to Swallow.


BANK 1 - APC40 FUNCTIONS AS NORMAL

Upon trawling the forum for info I discovered a post that told us how to kind of initialize the APC. There seemed to be two different methods so I did both.

Upon activation of BANK 1 preset I sent an outgoing MIDI message F0 7E 00 06 01 F7 to the APC40
Another way was to send a SHIFT button ON & OFF message

In my experience the Shift On & Off message works the best. For the above I have routed them to the APC40 and also Bome Virtual Out 1 ports and made sure Swallow was not selected for either.



Well that's it really it does seem to work. I can change to different banks that are currently blank slates but this can easily be customized to taste. On my Bome Bank 2 preset I've turned 4 CLIP LAUNCH buttons into cursor keys that light up red.

I'm still very green with Bome so advice on any of the above would be appreciated. I've also uploaded my Bome Project for anyone who wishes to take a peek.

Great work mate....

From my own experience you may hit into trouble as your using the shift button (which sends all sorts of sysex) as your bank select.... You may be better off at this early stage changing the button to say the metronome button or another lightly used function....

Cheers
D

Thanks for the heads up, that might just explain some of the glitchy behavior I have experienced whilst switching banks.

I'll try that out today and post results, the metronome button seems a logical choice.

Cheers

After a bit of testing your idea of not using the shift button as the shift function in bome worked well.
I indeed used the metronome button instead and as far as I can tell any of the glitchy behavior I was experienced has now gone.

So cheers for that

Debrecini, thanks for your great post. You actually got me started as finally someone out there made some sense! I am using
your method to change preset banks, although in a slightly different manner- I'm using the stop all clips button to trigger a scene, which
gets turned off as I leave the button (just a personal preference).
I'm curious to know if you stumbled upon any problems with the APC 40's lights switching back on when going back to it's native configuration? The lights
remain switched off. I tried killing the timer as the preset is turned off, but no success. Also tried to have green button as on, red as off for the clip launch
buttons, to turn on/off EQ kills but no success. Any ideas?
Thanks again, you really helped.