Airturn pedal to control FM9?

SJonesofva

SJonesofva

Inspired
Hi all,

I have an Airturn BT-200/S-4 bluetooth pedal that I bought to switch patches in JamUp Pro on my phone. It has a MIDI mode. I am wondering if there is a way to use it to control the FM9 by sending MIDI commands to the FM9? I am thinking some sort of wireless bluetooth receiver to connect to the FM9? Perhaps a Yamaha MD-BT01?

Anybody done anything like this? Could it work?

Thanks,

Steve
 
Gosh, was hoping to get at least one response.

I'm going to order the Yamaha MD-BT01 and give it a try. Would love to have four more switches.

Steve
 
After thinking about it and researching it more, I don't think it will work. I would be able to get the Airturn pedal to pair with the Airturn app on my phone, and program the pedal for MIDI mode and to send PC messages (or whatever), I would be able to get the Yamaha MD-BT01 to pair with my phone, but I don't see a way to set it up so MIDI control messages from the Airturn go to the MD-BT01 for input to the FM9. What is needed is an app on my phone that connects to both devices and acts as a bridge. And I don't believe that app exists.

Steve
 
Generally we use this when we have scores on iPads.

Before I had a md bt 01 connected to my kemper stage, forscore on my iPad. My irig blue turn (similar thing to the air turn) was used to scroll up and down through scores on forscore and forscore was sending the midi commands to the kemper.

Now i have the irig blue turn scrolling through forscore that send midi to Airstep that is connected to the fm3 via midi cable.

So yes you have to have an app on the iPad to communicate midi to the fractal unit via md bt 01
 
SJonesofva said:
Gosh, was hoping to get at least one response.

I'm going to order the Yamaha MD-BT01 and give it a try. Would love to have four more switches.

Steve
Click to expand...
Give it time. Someone will see it and reply.

Y'know, years ago, we'd post something on a board and have to wait days sometimes to get a response. And it was an improvement over my first college programming class, when dirt was rocks, and we'd run our program cards through the reader and come back the next day for the printout.

Uphill!

Both ways!

images (9).jpeg
 
Joe Bfstplk said:
Give it time. Someone will see it and reply.

Y'know, years ago, we'd post something on a board and have to wait days sometimes to get a response. And it was an improvement over my first college programming class, when dirt was rocks, and we'd run our program cards through the reader and come back the next day for the printout.

Uphill!

Both ways!

View attachment 117431
Click to expand...

We may be similar vintage. We had an IBM 1130. It would read one job deck (in Fortran), compile, link, and run, and then print the results. Then it would read the next job deck. All the stoodents had to wait in line for their turn. At least I didn't have to wait a day for the printout. If you had a compile error you had to go back to the keypunch, make cards to fix the problem, then go wait in line again.

We also had teletype terminals that had a cradle for a phone. You'd dial a number, put the phone receiver in the cradle, and hopefully connect to a mainframe at another school. Then once connected. You'd type in your Basic code on the clunky keyboard, and it would type out your results on the teletype paper. You could save your program on paper tape, so we'd be carrying around these rolls of tape with our programs on them.
 
SJonesofva said:
We may be similar vintage. We had an IBM 1130. It would read one job deck (in Fortran), compile, link, and run, and then print the results. Then it would read the next job deck. All the stoodents had to wait in line for their turn. At least I didn't have to wait a day for the printout. If you had a compile error you had to go back to the keypunch, make cards to fix the problem, then go wait in line again.

We also had teletype terminals that had a cradle for a phone. You'd dial a number, put the phone receiver in the cradle, and hopefully connect to a mainframe at another school. Then once connected. You'd type in your Basic code on the clunky keyboard, and it would type out your results on the teletype paper. You could save your program on paper tape, so we'd be carrying around these rolls of tape with our programs on them.
Click to expand...
Undoubtedly within a few years, so I figure you get the tongue in cheek bump I gave yer post so it stays visible in the recent activity, in hopes more of the bluetoof midi users roll through here.... ;)

BASIC was where I started, on ye olde TRS80 computers, saving our code on cassettes. The new one we got in the math lab (which the teachers hogged) had lower case letters and 64k of RAM. Used to love leaving this program running for the next person:

10 G$ = INKEY$
20 PRINT G$;
30 GOTO 10

:D
 
SJonesofva said:
Hi all,

I have an Airturn BT-200/S-4 bluetooth pedal that I bought to switch patches in JamUp Pro on my phone. It has a MIDI mode. I am wondering if there is a way to use it to control the FM9 by sending MIDI commands to the FM9? I am thinking some sort of wireless bluetooth receiver to connect to the FM9? Perhaps a Yamaha MD-BT01?

Anybody done anything like this? Could it work?

Thanks,

Steve
Click to expand...

I'm not familiar with the Airturn, but I do the same thing on my FM3 using an airstep pedal connected by bluetooth to a WIDI jack. works well - the airstep is programmed to select scenes 1 to 5 on the FM3. I think last nights outing was probably the last for the FM3 however as I also have a shiny FM9 which I think has plenty of switches so as not to need anything extra.

Also have a look at this thread:

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/midi-output-voltage-widi-master-is-getting-hot.171579/

I don't know if the same issue exists on the FM9.
 
I'm guessing at least one of the reasons you're not getting much response is because it's simply never occurred to me to control my FM9 with anything other than my FM9. Mostly thinking in terms of what I do of course. It's interesting to hear how other's are using BT.
 
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blackmoreguitar said:
I'm not familiar with the Airturn, but I do the same thing on my FM3 using an airstep pedal connected by bluetooth to a WIDI jack. works well - the airstep is programmed to select scenes 1 to 5 on the FM3. I think last nights outing was probably the last for the FM3 however as I also have a shiny FM9 which I think has plenty of switches so as not to need anything extra.

Also have a look at this thread:

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/midi-output-voltage-widi-master-is-getting-hot.171579/

I don't know if the same issue exists on the FM9.
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting this thread. Very interesting. I wonder if the FM9 has the same issue?
 
blackmoreguitar said:
Also have a look at this thread:

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/midi-output-voltage-widi-master-is-getting-hot.171579/

I don't know if the same issue exists on the FM9.
Click to expand...
I sent a question to Fractal support and got this response from Kevin Hall:

The Midi on the FM9 does not use 5V as is the case with the FM3 it uses the same 3.3V as the AFX3. So you should not have any issues with overheating.​

So I'm going to order the WIDI Master and give it a go. Thanks @blackmoreguitar for posting this thread! Looks like the WIDI Master will do what I want. There are even YouTube videos of how to pair the WIDI Master with the Airturn pedal!

Thanks,

Steve
 
So I ordered and received this morning a WIDI Master from Sweetwater. Getting this to work wasn't straight forward but I'll share what I did in case anyone wants to do same.

1st, the WIDI Master works fine with the FM9, doesn't heat up at all
2nd, the first thing you have to do is update the firmware on the WIDI Master. Otherwise it will not connect to the Airsturn. For some reason this took hours to get to work. I honestly don't know exactly what I did to finally get it to work properly. Finally it did, and the actual update took about a minute or so.
3rd, you have to properly program the Airturn so it sends the correct MIDI messages using the Airturn App. This turned out to be two messages for each footswitch which I didn't get at first until I looked at the MIDI REFERENCE TABLES on page 118 of the Owner's Manual. You have to first select the MIDI bank for a preset, and then the preset number within that bank. I guess because MIDI only handles values up to 128? So pressing a footswitch needs to send MIDI Bank Select (CC#0) Value , Midi Program Change = FM9 Preset Number (within that bank per the reference table).
4th, you need to make sure MIDI options are set right (MIDI Channel to 1, Program Change to ON for example) in the MIDI/Remote menu on the FM9.

Things seemed to work best when I didn't have my phone paired with either the Airturn or the WIDI Master. That's a trick since you need to use phone apps to program both devices...

Anyway, I got this to work and can do what I need to do. I'll see how it works when playing at church. Hopefully it's not too flakey being a bluetooth solution.

Steve
 
Spoke too soon. Disconnected the WIDI Master to change the preset settings being selected by the Airturn, and now it doesn't work again.

Seems pretty flakey.
 
After last post I got it working, but had a problem. What was happening is I had a footswitch programmed in MIDI to select Preset 165. Instead it was selecting Preset 0. After conferring with tech support I "reverted" to Firmware 4.0 instead of Version 4.01 public beta 2. So far that has solved the problem I was having. Without changing anything else the switch now selects preset 165 as it is programmed. Guess I found a Beta firmware bug.
 
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