Control your DAW with your feet!
Create Digital Music has an excellent tutorial on creating a foot pedal from a QWERTY keyboard for use with Ableton Live so you can record hands-free. Check it out at Create Digital Music. If I knew of something like this for Logic and Reason, I’d be building it right now!
I’d like to see an implementation that accounts for the small key size; maybe some kind of modification that makes the pushable area larger. If you’re an Ableton user, head on over and take a look. I think it’ll be worth your time.
Update: Michael Una, the author of the tutorial, left this useful comment:
Hi Joel. With a little bit of ingenuity, you can apply this DIY footcontroller to any DAW.
The trick is all in the key scripting programs I mention in the article- you can very easily script any combination of keystrokes and mouse actions to be triggered by the push of a single key.
So, with a little fiddling, you could assign each of the buttons on the footcontroller to a different function, such as play, record, mute, solo, etc.
Also, it’s a bit hard to see in the pictures, but I did hot glue some larger bits of plastic to the keys to increase the surface area of each button. I used a transparent plastic so I could still read which key was which, but you could really glue anything on there.
September 1st, 2007 at 10:25 am
Hi Joel. With a little bit of ingenuity, you can apply this DIY footcontroller to any DAW.
The trick is all in the key scripting programs I mention in the article- you can very easily script any combination of keystrokes and mouse actions to be triggered by the push of a single key.
So, with a little fiddling, you could assign each of the buttons on the footcontroller to a different function, such as play, record, mute, solo, etc.
Also, it’s a bit hard to see in the pictures, but I did hot glue some larger bits of plastic to the keys to increase the surface area of each button. I used a transparent plastic so I could still read which key was which, but you could really glue anything on there.
September 1st, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Thanks for the handy tips, Michael! I’ll put your comment in the main text of the post for readers.