So I purchased a new piece of kit for my mobile music production, as always, I did extensive research into what was the best option for me.
And of course I still worried day and night if I’d wasted money on something I didn’t need. This is standard operation for me, especially since I have to wait for things to be delivered, and getting things delivered on the road has its own stress connected to it.
Anyway, after an eternity of stressful waiting, I finally had it in my hands, The Launchpad X! Now I was quite happy to meet this beautiful piece of kit and surprised as well. Something had me thinking that the pads would feel like buttons. Of course it makes sense that they probably aren’t, but I’d not had the joy of seeing this baby in real life, just on YouTube after YouTube video. So after this little surprise, I sadly didn’t have time to do much more than plug her into my MacBook and go through the registration period. I don’t have much in the way of music production on my computer, so it was waiting until the next day for the big play on my iPad Pro.
I might add here that I get awful nervous about throwing out the boxes of a lot of these things, and when I lived in a house, I had a bad habit of keeping boxes. Either they would get put away in them after every use, or they would be kept for easy boxing when moving house. I also like the boxes for easy resell if me and this piece of kit don’t work out.
Finally, the day came when I could have a play on my iPad. The reason I’d purchased the Launchpad was because of the pressure-sensitive buttons and notes mode. So this was the feature I played around with the most that day, and also the reason why I went to bed with a smile on my face and a box in the bin.
Now the reason for this random chat is to do with next day spent with my wonderful Launchpad (which I obviously need to name).
In my research, I came across people getting the Launchpads to work in different iPad apps, mostly GarageBand, Beatmaker 3 and Koala Sampler.
Slowly, I started to understand the power of this midi controller. However, I still wasn’t sure if I’d be able to hit some of its full potential within Cubasis 3 since I couldn’t find a single YouTube video or article on that exact pairing.
So I spent the day with my MacBook, iPad and Launchpad (on my tiny fold-out table), switching back and forth between everything trying to learn all the intricate details I’d need to accomplish exactly what I felt would be the perfect setup for me.
I might pause here for a minute and just mention my fist ever midi controller, the Novation Launchkey 25. This was around 2015, my partner surprised me with it for either Christmas or birthday. She knew I’d been standing in JB Hi-Fi daydreaming about one and all the awesome things I could do if only I had one. I might add I didn’t yet own a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and had only played around with one a couple of times previously. Somehow, I had in my head that I couldn’t even think about being an awesome music producer without a midi controller (not correct of course).
Needless to say, life got in the way, and I didn’t get to actually use it until we hit the road in 2019 and I found myself with a mobile production set up. Oops, it seems I got a little off topic, the point of the Launchkey mention is, I had this grand idea that I’d just plug it in and suddenly all these buttons, nobs and keys would magically do exactly what I thought they would do.
They didn’t!
I was super disappointed because to understand why and how to make it do what I wanted seemed so complicated and out of my depth.
So now fast forward back to me with my MacBook, iPad and the LaunchPad, and this awesome feeling when I finally had this midi controller doing exactly what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it.
I felt this wasn’t a simple task since midi learn in Cubasis 3 didn’t learn everything I wanted. I wanted erase, undo, redo, copy and paste to be a big highlight on my controller, which Cubasis 3 does not have learnable. So, after some digging around, I found I could do keystroke buttons and, via shortcuts, I had exactly what I wanted.
I might add that Cubasis 3 was only a small part of the figuring out, because I wanted some of my drum apps to work neatly within the same user preset. Boy, did I have to do some moving and shuffling and such to try and make that one work, too. Not exactly how I wanted, but it was way more functional than when I started, and I marked it off as another little win.
The moral of this rant is, I did it!
For a moment in time, I put a bunch of information together and accomplished something my past self didn’t think I could ever do.
But even more, I did it on something less popular with less information/tutorials than the popular route. Now I know this isn’t the ONLY time I’ve done exactly this, but I do know I’m not very good at sitting back and going “I did that” satisfyingly! So here I am actually writing about it, and I’m sure unintentionally giving myself another thumbs up by doing so.
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