The Black Widow Mk III MIDI

I described first of all the creation of the Black Widow Sample Player and Manipulator, and then some significant improvements in The Black Widow Mark II.

The improvements made in the Black Widow Mk III add to the ease and accuracy of use by adding MIDI control.

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The particular device I had in mind was my trusty Korg Nanokontrol v1, which I use for a number of other applications such as  the FXBOX and the REplay PLAYer .

With 9 sliders, 9 rotary controls and 18 buttons, the Nanokontrol gives access to a large number of parameters. All I had to do was link the CC  numbers output from the Nanokontrol to the inputs of the controls in the Pd (Pure Data) patch for the Black Widow.

In this case I didn’t need to use the Korg Editor application to reassign any of the default CC numbers, I just needed to use the default numbers appropriately in the Pd patch.

For the most part, this just meant creating a duplicate set of controls accepting MIDI input from the Nanokontrol, alongside the controls accepting ‘hid’ (Human Interface Device) input from the Black Widow throttle/joystick.  These are typical examples:

In the same way as the ‘hid’ inputs, all 4 samples can be operated by the same button, slider or rotary control; exactly which sample is to be affected is chosen beforehand.  Due to the complexity of the selection page relating to the ‘hid’ controls, the MIDI controls have been placed separately, but the typical output – e.g. [s filter1], [s filter2] etc. are identical to the outputs of the ‘hid’ controls elsewhere.

The main page of the Black Widow Pd patch has been changed to reflect the new additions:

At the same time, there have been a few other updates, including provision for the file names to be displayed on the Sample Monitor screen and improvements to the Track Active and Reverb/Echo on/off indicators:

These various updates have taken the current version number to 37.  This or a later version of the patch can be found here.  [Click ‘Save Link As’].