H9 and Arturia Beatstep- A New Era

[camn]

Hey everyone. 

ever since I got the H9, I have been loving it. 

My main rig was just the H9 with 3 aux switches.. one for the “performance switch”, the other 2 to cycle presets. The On-pedal button for tap tempo.

I would do all the programming at home.. and have banks of presets for songs that I cycle through in rehearsals and on stage.

 

BUT- I always wanted more. 

I had tried hooking up various midi controllers.. but now I have found the ARTURIA BEATSTEP.. and I  intend to report on it’s functionality.. and hopefully work through the kinks here. People had talked about it, but I never really saw a in-use setup here.

Report to follow. Plus questions.

 

The thing is totally rugged enough to be a floorboard, BTW.. but Im not doing that

[camn]

SO – 

Verdict is this:

The 16 pads work perfectly as Program Change controls, and as such can pull any patch or toggle states easil. 

THe STOP and PLAY are less perfect- although they can be setup to send CC or PC data, it looks like this is IN ADDITION to the STOP and PLAY commands… and it isn’t clean on the H9. 

They do work perfectly using the LOOPER to play or stop the loop. 

 

The knobs are all useable to a limited extent. 

They can all send Midi CC, and I have 10 of them setup to control the 10 variables. . . the other ones for Input/Output volume and program change (without activating)…. but they are a little bit of a bummer. 

The I/O volumes seem to work perfectly. 

The rest are dodgy because there is no “latch” mode..You can either have them send an absolute or relative CC value.. which doesnt necessarily match the pre-existing value in the pedal. This is a limitation of UNIDIRECTIONAL midi info, imo.

If that didnt make sense- its like this:

I have a knob set to control “Mix”. The preset has a predefined value of..30. But the Beatstep doesnt know this.. so when I first touch it- it sends a value it know.. say “60”. From that point onward the knob is smooth.. but there is an immediate jump from 30–>60 at first. Then.. say I leave the final value at 100… when I switch presets.. then NEXT preset’s mix might be “10”.. but when I twiddle the know it sends “100” up front. So its a little wonky.

 

Bottom Line: Preset changes with pads are PERFECT- Knobs less so.

[togethernessnyc]

I have a knob set to control “Mix”. The preset has a predefined value of..30. But the Beatstep doesnt know this.. so when I first touch it- it sends a value it know.. say “60”. From that point onward the knob is smooth.. but there is an immediate jump from 30–>60 at first. Then.. say I leave the final value at 100… when I switch presets.. then NEXT preset’s mix might be “10”.. but when I twiddle the know it sends “100” up front. So its a little wonky.

Bottom Line: Preset changes with pads are PERFECT- Knobs less so.

[/quote]

 

I came across this post while wondering if the Beatstep/H9 combo was possible, thanks for the info. Do you know if the knobs situation has been improved with any of the updates to the Beatstep firmware? 

[camn]

The Knobs situation CANNOT be improved from the beatstep side- this is fully limited by the H9.

The Arturia stuff has crazy flexibility in MIDI assignments.. but the H9 would need to support relative changes or pickup changes for it to be perfect.

[jlmiralles]

Hi there!
I created a tutorial on how to control the H9 with a external midi controller (Arturia Beatstep) with the help of Ableton Live, H9_remote (a max4live device by Daniel Collins) and Control Surface Studio (for creating a custom remote script).
With the tutorial we’ll SEE always the 10 knob values of the current preset in the pedal, and SEND RELATIVE midi info in order to have smoothy changes in that values. Also we will have the ability to fast change to the desired presets with only pressing pads, and automatically send again relative midi info to the new values. Here is the link:

Eventide h9 advanced control with arturia beatstep

[camn]

That is a hot workaround if you use ableton. 

Nice work!

 

IF ONLY eventide would support relative CC changes… we could get some really awsome controllers going.

[skywriter]

@camn, thanks for the initial research! Now I can use that beatstep I had for something useful.

[Author]

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