Hey, I’ve decided to make the jump back to Ribbons after today’s announcement of a new pink batch. One of the things I’ve been exploring with my looper is TouchOSC. A quick search of the forum brought up this old topic.
So, has anyone else explored making TouchOSC interfaces for Ribbons?
Just a rough sketch at this point - note that these are default colors, except for the blue radial in the top left, and all my alignments are wacky. I just wanted to get a sense for what all I might want to control. Of course, nothing’s labeled, either.
And once I get happier with layout I need to actually assign the MIDI values to each of the visual controls. Once the new pedal arrives and I have a chance to use this for a while, I’ll also get a better idea if any of the radials should be sliders, for example, and which radials should default to being centered at noon, etc.
It turns out I might want to control a LOT. So on the left side I have fourteen radials; essentially tape effects. I will probably have Mix and Compression at the top, followed by Reverb Mix/Placement and Reverb Decay. Then the two filters, followed by the Wow & Flutter and then Degradation. I will play with the size and color so the grouping is a little more visual.
On the top right I have a radio selector for the seven touch modes, plus two radials. I made them a little larger. On the left one (T1) I segmented the radial into twelve sections, to make it easier to dial in Magnetic Dance settings.
The 16 radials in the lower right are for the four loop tracks, plus a radio selector above them to select which loop is the active one. I haven’t decided whether I want the loop controls vertical or horizontal.
I added a few buttons and radios to control Loop Mode or Tape Effect mode, Loop Erase/All Loop Erase.
Any feedback would be welcome.
Here’s a more refined draft. At this point I really need the pedal in hand to make sure what I’m intending to happen actually happens. I think I’ve covered pretty much everything that can be controlled by a MIDI command, except for the synth controls and actually pressing a footswitch.
Cool project. Do you like TouchOSC? I was planning to do something similar for a couple pedals, but with MIDI Designer.
Could you share the TouchOSC file?
Kudos for this!!
I’ve been looking to do something similar… as I’ve posted before, these deep-function pedals (not only KT, also CBA, for example…) really shine when MIDI is involved.
How difficult is it to build w/ TouchOSC?
Sure - let’s try this link:
It’s pretty easy - at least, what I’ve done has been pretty easy. But what I’ve put together is all one-way communication. So this interface doesn’t get feedback from the pedal and reflect changes. So you might think, “hey, this interface shows mix is at 100%, but it sounds like it’s at 50%.” Well, if you changed the knob on the pedal to 50%, this TouchOSC interface doesn’t know it.
So what I do with it is once I fire up the pedal and my iPad, I change the settings on TouchOSC to match what I want, and only use TouchOSC to control (aside from hitting the footswitches).
I do know that it’s possible to have two-way communication, so the display on TouchOSC will show changes made on the pedal, but I’m not that advanced.
So it’s not a super-duper be-all, end-all controller for the pedal. But it solves a lot of problems for me.
Last question: how are you sending MIDI from your tablet to the boxes on the floor? 
Sorry, just saw this. I use a CME WIDI device - H4MIDI WC with the optional WIDI chip. But the iPad will do Bluetooth MIDI just fine, so any WIDI will work. Also, I have not tested it yet, but apparently the MC8 Pro Blutooth function will connect in an iPad with no issues.
I’m not actually sure that you can get this feedback. The ribbons only supports midi in. So while you can send mdi input, the ribbons only sends out audio. There wouldn’t be a data path to see any changes made on the pedal. @jaakjensen or @carl_cat could confirm/deny.
