Cheap foot controller for looping in Ableton Live

[James B]

Maybe there's more appropriate forums out there for this topic, but I thought I'd try it here first...

I've been interested in looping in Live for a while, but I've been put off by the price and size of the foot controllers as I just want to give it a go for a bit of fun/ experimentation rather than anything serious.

Anyway, I picked up four of these Stealth Switch things for about ?14 in total on ebay, thought I had nothing to lose at that price. They're surprisingly solid and would work pretty well if I could set them up right.

Basically they function as a keyboard, except with just one key which is the number 5. So I assigned key "5" to record slot one in Ableton. This works fine, but the problem is that the other three switches are all simply recognised as number 5 also. Ableton/ Mac OS can't tell that they're separate devices, so they can't be assigned to different functions in Live.

I have the iKey key mapping/ automation software, but this also doesn't seem able to recognise them as separate devices.

Anyone got any advice?

Cheers.

[diligentdogs]

Something I did, which is absolutely hackish as hell but works well and is free:

I've got a PS2 Keyboard to USB converter and tons of old PS2 keyboards laying around. I'll map different Live functions to keys that are far apart on the keyboard - Left Shift, G, P, etc, and then use a screwdriver to pop off all the keys around those so that I can hit the desired keys with my foot.

[Dan Rosato]

Something I did, which is absolutely hackish as hell but works well and is free:

I've got a PS2 Keyboard to USB converter and tons of old PS2 keyboards laying around. I'll map different Live functions to keys that are far apart on the keyboard - Left Shift, G, P, etc, and then use a screwdriver to pop off all the keys around those so that I can hit the desired keys with my foot.

I've got the same thing going. One the that helps is to glue something to the top of each key that you're using to make it easier to hit...I'm sure you've got a million things around the house that would work perfectly for this.

[comfortstarr]

Bumping and refining this thread.

I'm recently coming off a longish recording hiatus. I upgraded to Logic 9 and lo and behold Mainstage can now do realtime looping with the cool "loopback" plug. So, I too, require a midi foot controller. While I generally stay away from Behringer stuff, their pedal (FCB1010) seems kind of ideal.

Anyone have any experience with it and Mainstage? Any other reccos?

Thanks in advance.

[dubphaser]

I highly recommend the Logidy UMI3. Really rugged and easy to setup.
I made a video that they posted on their site. It goes on a bit but shows how easy it is to use it with Ableton Live (and probably anything else that lets you map midi)

http://logidy.com/

[C_R_J]

i use one of these

http://www.behringer.com/assets/FCB1010 ... ft_XXL.jpg

mine is reprogrammed to send cc messages though. its a bitch to reprogram. it might work with the default programming. ill mess with mine later and report back.