More and more musicians are using laptops in their rigs. Wouldn't it be great to
harness the power of those laptops to offer greater control capabilities than are
usually available in MIDI foot controllers?
Well, yeah, if you're already using a laptop - but you wouldn't want to lose the
flexibility that foot control offers either.
Enter a hybrid hardware/software MIDI foot controller. A hybrid system separates
the physical interface from the control logic so that the logic can run on a computer.
The logic, or engine, is more easily maintainable and updated when it runs as an
application on a computer than as firmware in dedicated hardware.
Using the monome, you build your own MIDI foot controller but run the brains of
the foot controller on a computer. I'm currently running mTroll on a very inexpensive
generic Walmart tablet PC running Windows 10 with 2GB RAM.
Neither the hardware nor the software requires a MIDI channel.
The controller hardware is powered by the computer via USB, supports 64 physical
switches, 64 LEDs, and 4 expression pedals.
If you aren't happy with current MIDI foot control offerings or just want to build
one yourself, read on to learn more about my DIY MIDI controller.