DIY Foot pedal MIDI controller for Ableton Live
For quite a long time I have been digging a cheap alternative for a foot controller that I can use with Ableton Live. For some time I thought that my only option was to spend 300EUR on the McMillen Softstep 2. But luckily I found a couple of tutorials online about using a USB NES game controller to create a DIY foot controller.
Since I am most of the time using the guitar, bass or my hands are busy, I need to have an affordable and reliable hands-free option to trigger the three main functions that I need: - record (launch and record a clip particularly) - play - start/stop the metronome
For this project I invested around 30EUR, which in turn
You will need:
One box
4 buttons (on/off) type
Soldering wire, pistol/iron, melting alloy
USB game controller
Drill
In addition, you will need to make use of Max4Live in order to "translate" the signals from the game controller to specific messages that Ableton Live will receive (via the Ableton Live Object Model API).
Here you can download the patch that I made: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/3570/snes-game-controller-for-lom
Let me know if you have questions.
MIDI foot controller with arduino
Another interesting alternative which I have not tried, it is to use an arduino. Here some links:
https://sites.google.com/site/bharatbhushankonka/home/diy-midi-over-usb-using-arduino-uno https://sites.google.com/site/bharatbhushankonka/home/usb-midi-footcontroler-2-0