Using the MPK49 with Fxpansion Guru, Controller Bank B

USING THE MPK49 WITH FXPANSION GURU

Fxpansion’s Guru software is a very flexible and creative tool for making all kinds of beats and grooves.

Guru comes preset with default MIDI note and controller note mappings that serve a bunch of different purposes.

Notes can be set to trigger sounds, map a sound chromatically and play it from a keyboard, trigger different patterns and trigger different scenes.

There are 8 MIDI controllers that are set up for using with the individual voice engines called Pad Groups, and 8 more that are setup to be used with any of the the FX Group.

Reference the Guru manual to see how to assign these functions to the different parameters.

We have supplied a preset that makes use of the most used functions of Guru. This preset is meant to be used with GURU’s GENERIC CONTROLLER map in the OPTIONS menu.

KEYBOARD – The keyboard is set to trigger pads from middle C up 16 notes. The default is set to control ENGINE 1 on MIDI Channel 1. By editing the keyboard MIDI channel, you can select which voice engine you are controlling. We set middle C to be the pads so that if you have “Pattern keys play selected pad chromatically” in the OPTIONS/MIDI page, you will then hear the currently selected pad played chromatically on the bottom two octaves of the keyboard. If you press the OCTAVE UP button twice, the drum pads will play on the lowest 16 notes of the keyboard and the notes from middle C up will trigger different SCENES.

TRANSPORT Controls – GURU makes use of MMC for its transport controls. If you have the latest version of Guru it will automatically make use of MMC messages. GURU makes use of the << REW command and assigns it to the COMMIT function and the >> FF command and assigns it to the UNDO function.

MIDI Controllers – We have created 3 different options for continuous controller mapping with GURU. Since the MIDI controllers are color coded in Guru we will call them as follows:

Red = 1

Orange = 2

Yellow = 3

Green = 4

Lt Blue = 5

Blue = 6

Purple = 7

Grey = 8

Controller Bank A

Knobs 1- 8 - Pad Group 1-8

Sliders 1- 8 - FX Group 1-8

Switches 1- 4 – Pad Group 5-8

Switches 5-8 – FX Group 5-8

Controller Bank B

(Knobs and Sliders in Controller Bank B are reversed from Controller Bank A)

Knobs 1- 8 - FX Group 1-8

Sliders 1- 8 - Pad Group 1-8

Switches 1- 4 – Pad Group 5-8

Switches 5-8 – FX Group 5-8

Controller Bank C

(Knobs and sliders are split so that you get 4 knobs and 4 sliders for each Group.)

Knobs 1- 4 - Pad Group 1-4

Knobs 5- 8 - FX Group 1-4

Sliders 1- 4 - Pad Group 1-4

Sliders 5- 8 - FX Group 5-8

Switches 1- 4 – Pad Group 5-8

Switches 5-8 – FX Group 5-8

PADS – We have purposely left the pad mapping to be chromatic. The pads can be customized for so many uses in Guru that we didn’t want to make them too specialized. Currently the 12 pads in bank A and Pads 1-4 in bank B will normally play the Guru pads. We left these set to the COMMON channel so that you could quickly change them to different voice engines by changing the COMMON channel in the GLOBAL menu. But depending on how you are using Guru you may want to change the pad note and channel mappings. For instance:

Recording patterns - you may want to leave the way they are. This will allow you to play your drum sounds and allow you to shift engines via changing the Common channel.

Playing Live – you may want to assign the pads to different MIDI channels and notes so as to trigger SCENES or PATTERNS in a real0time DJ style work flow.