Boss VG-800 and MIDI Captain MIDI controller pedal

[Stratman57]

I am using my VG-800 with the Paint Audio MIDI Captain, it's working great in that I have 8 of the foot switches assigned to turn on and off various effects, div for amp switching and BPM tap tempo. However I'm having trouble working out how to program the button colours to be on when I've activated it the to go off again when I deactivate it. The default condition seems to be that the last button touched stays lit. This is with firmware version 3.0 in Geek mode.

Anyone cracked this problem?

I did attempt to post this query on the VG guitar forums however I was defeated by their post verification system.

Regards, Simon.

[Kwackman]

I don't know what geek mode is, but it sounds way above my skills.
I "cheated" by cutting & pasting to change a page in "Supersetup" until I got what I needed- it took a while.

My suggestion is check the LED mode?

"keytimes = [1]
# ledmode can be select/normal/tap
# 'select' means all the 'select' led can be only one current selected lighting
# 'normal' means just showing the ledcolorX normally
# 'tap' means a tapping speed flashing action"

Maybe you have "Select" rather than "Normal"?

[Stratman57]

Geek mode is where you do the custom PC, CC or note MIDI settings rather than preset mode, which doesn't have a preset for the VG-800. It's accessed by holding down the number 2 button when switching on. It allows up to 6 MIDI messages on the down push and a further 6 on the release of the button.

I'll give your Key edits a go.

Regards, Simon.

[Kwackman]

Geek mode is where you do the custom PC, CC or note MIDI settings rather than preset mode, which doesn't have a preset for the VG-800.

All I used the MIDI Captain for was turning FX on/off in the Headrest MX5 via MIDI.
You're digging deeper than that, so that LED idea might not work?
Good luck!

[Stratman57]

I tried your suggested edits, but that made no difference to my problem. However, it got me thinking about the presets, so I went into the Bias preset (number 2) and the VG-800 responded to button presses on the MIDI Captain, albeit that the A, B, C and D buttons were program changes, whilst the 1, 2, 3 and 4 buttons did produce CC messages.

So putting the MIDI Captain into USB mode I went into the Setup folder, chose the preset2 sub folder and edited the Key number .txt files for the relevant buttons to be CC messages and entered the CC numbers and velocity corresponding to the assignments I'd setup in the VG-800 tone studio app and I now have the LEDs on when the FX is on and off when the FX is off.

It doesn't appear that this is possible in Geek mode, although the manual is not great at explaining any of this.

So a good MIDI pedal for less than £100 (I got it during this October's Prime days) with lots of programming possibilities once you can get your head around the weird .txt file editing. It took me back to win.ini days.

Thanks Kwackman for pointing me in the right direction.

Regards, Simon.

[arkieboy]

I did attempt to post this query on the VG guitar forums however I was defeated by their post verification system.

Kudos: I've made over 1.1k posts to the forum and never had a post verification problem

[Stratman57]

Well, I correctly entered the letters in the picture, and unless a GK cable has more than 13 pins I gave the correct answer to the question and it said I had made a mistake in one or both.

Still I managed to sort out my problem so happy days.

Regards, Simon.

[merlyn]

... So a good MIDI pedal for less than £100 (I got it during this October's Prime days) with lots of programming possibilities once you can get your head around the weird .txt file editing. ...

It's GUIs that are weird.

Not knowing what a MIDI Captain was, I looked it up and discovered that there is version 4 firmware available, which includes Super Mode:

https://paintaudio.com/products/paint-a ... ptain-blue

[Stratman57]

The one I have came with the 3.5 version firmware, however looking at the various YouTube videos from Paint Audio, it seemed to me that the 4.0 firmware upgrade was aimed at Kemper profiler users.

At the moment I have it doing what I needed for my VG-800 in a live situation.

I'm planning on using the 4 and 9 buttons to send out MIDI messages to Ableton Live to change patches on my bands keyboard player's keyboards for each song in our set list.

Regards, Simon .

[zenguitar]

Thanks to this Topic I've bookmarked the MIDI Captain site for future reference.

Many thanks

Andy

[arkieboy]

Well, I correctly entered the letters in the picture, and unless a GK cable has more than 13 pins I gave the correct answer to the question and it said I had made a mistake in one or both.

Still I managed to sort out my problem so happy days.

Regards, Simon.

Sorry Simon, I was a bit sarky.

Do you need me to ping the admins to flag a bug - is the problem persisting?

[Stratman57]

No need, I think I may have figured out my verification problem, the question was "how many pins does a GK cable have" I answered 13, as it's always referred to as a 13 pin cable, however it dawned on me last night that the cable has 13 pins at both ends, so I suspect my answer should have been 26.

Regards, Simon.