Recording - July 2013 - 60

MIDI Designer
Build your own control surfaces (including guitar pedalboards!)
with this easy-to-use app
Review by Mike Metlay

If you’re interested in exploring the possibilities of
using an iOS device as a remote MIDI controller
(whether wired or wireless) for your gear or your
DAW, MIDI Designer offers a solid set of design and
performance tools with some very hip extras. You can
do all your design right on your iPad/iPhone/iPod touch with no external
laptop design program needed, and new features and shortcuts are being
added at an incredible rate.
The workspace—Pages and Pedalboards
The MIDI Designer interface consists of a split screen, with each half organized in Banks, each of which can have one or more tabbed Pages. The
simplest interfaces will have one Page that stretches across both sides of the
screen, but it’s easy to stack many Pages and flip between them (either with
finger taps or external controls) to access different sets of controls.
In addition to the Pages on the two halves of your screen, there are two
hidden areas called Pedalboards that can be revealed if you swipe
upward on your display. The functions offered by Pedalboards aren’t
entirely unique to MIDI Designer, but it’s the only app we’re aware of that
has specifically created an easy-to-learn subset of controls for these purposes... and this being our Guitar issue, we figured this unique feature set
made this an ideal opportunity to introduce the app to our readers!
A dropdown menu that appears between the pages, down the center
of the screen, lets you access various modes that are usually hidden when
you’re actually making music in Performance Mode. This is where you get
access to modes where you can set up various aspects of MIDI Designer’s
operation (Configuration mode) or actually design your control surface
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RECORDING July 2013

(Design mode). This dropdown also lets you access up
to 20 Presets, each of which is a full set of parameter
values for every object in a Layout (MIDI Designer’s
term for a programmed control surface with all its
Pages and Pedalboards).
Designing your controller
In Design mode, adding a control is as simple as
tapping the screen where you want it to be. You then
choose its type, set up what MIDI or other messages it
sends, color it, adjust its behavior, size and shape it,
rename it, etc. There’s a set of basic object types—
Buttons, Knobs, Sliders, Crossfaders, and XY Pads,
plus informational/cosmetic Panels and Labels. But
most of these control types can be further configured
for extra features... I’ll give a few examples below.
Once you’ve created one object that does what you
like, you can quickly “clone” it using a command like
Make Similar, which will produce an almost-identical
object that will send a slightly different MIDI command—
a slider that sends MIDI Control Change 1 will be cloned
into one that sends CC 2, then another that sends CC 3,
etc. You can choose whether only as-yet-unused MIDI messages are available, or whether you
want to set up multiple objects that
send the same data (useful more
often than you realize).
Each object can have a default
value for the data it sends; this
value can simply be where the
control’s set when you call up the
Layout, or you can return to it
(instantly or with a built-in ramp
time) when you let go. For example, this lets you turn a
slider into a Pitch Wheel, just by having the control
snap back to the center when you release it.
Want to get fancier? There are lots of extras. Button
options include not only piano-key shapes so you can
design your own keyboard controllers (and have them
send different velocities depending on where you
touch them), but also a variety of actions for building
your own drumpads. You can even create isomorphic
keyboards using arrays of rectangular or hexagonal
keys! Knobs and sliders can be set so that each “tick”
not only sends a particular MIDI control or value but
has its own displayed name, so you could build, for
example, a control to select the waveform on a synthesizer or the program on an effects box and actually see the name of what you’re selecting.
And you’re not limited to working one control at a
time. It’s easy to assign one object (called a
Supercontrol) to control many other objects at once
(Subcontrols); there can be A and B sets of values that
map to one another, and you can invert and scale
control responses—so you can build, for example, a

Recording - July 2013

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