Midi

HI

I asking about midi 2 days ago. In forum are meny sposts about midi. Use SEARH

Hi Pedro,

There are a number of ways to use MIDI on Congo. So I'll give a few examples.

To get more info about MIDI (and other show control things) a good book to have is John Huntington's book Control Systems for Live Entertainment. It explains MIDI and MIDI Show Control very well. I highly recomend anyone who want's to play with Midi and Midi Show Control to get this book. http://www.lsionline.co.uk/books/?-v2pd8u

If you want to have a preset on Congo trigger the sound guys gear, the first question is what kind of MIDI protocols do the sound guys equipment understand?

You could have Congo send a MIDI note message or a MIDI Show Control message to the sound gear. These two types would be the most common used ways to control lighting or sound equipment.
You will also need to have a little knowledge of Hexadecimal values, see the decimal number to Hex conversion table at: http://www.ascii.cl/conversion.htm From that list you can see which decimal number equals which Hex value. For example decimal number 63 equals Hex 3F. Hex is just another way of presenting a decimal number. When writing raw Midi messages, most of the time you need to enter values in Hex.

Note On/Off messages

I just played around with this and you can use the Action Macro cell in the Sequence Editor to have a specific Step send a MIDI message you want. You will need to write the message you want to send mostly in Hex. To start with you will need to write "MIDI 1" into the action macro cell. This tells the console you want to send a MIDI message using Congos MIDI output. After "MIDI 1" you enter the message you want to send.

If you want to send a Note On message on MIDI Channel 1, the message would look something like this:
MIDI 1 90 24 40
If we break this up a little. The 9 in 90 means Note ON and the 0 in 90 refers to the Midi channel (0 equals channel 1 in this case). 24 is the Note number in Hex, the same as Note C2 on a MIDI keyboard (I guess that would be about the 36th note). And 40 is the Velocity in Hex (basically how fast you press a key on a MIDI keyboard). Velocity 64 in Hex equals 100 in decimal and is a velocity that is normally used then triggering stuff with Midi notes. Velocity values are always between 0-127 decimal (00 to 7F in Hex). Velocity 40 in Hex equals 64 in decimal.
By changing 24 to some other note number you can vary which note you send.
To send a Note Off message, replace the 90 in the example above to 80.

On Congo, if you enable sending Keys (in Setup > MIDI > Keys set to "Transmit") Congo send Note On messages for all the keys you press on Congo (and a Note off message is sent when you release a key). Keys can also be set to Recieve and this way you could press keys on Congo via MIDI. But for triggering something during playback, Keys would not work that well.

Midi Show Control

Or you could send MIDI Show Control (MSC) messages to the sound guys (or they could send MSC to you). In this case you will have to enter the Midi Show Control message in Hex into the Action Macro cell in Congo, similar to the Note On message.

Let's start with triggering Lighting consoles with MSC.
The Midi show control message is a little longer. For example a simple GO message that is sent to a lighting console would be:
F0 7F 01 02 01 01 F7
In this F0 7F means that this message is a Midi Show Control (MSC) message. The first 01 refers to Device Address of the recieving device (In Congo you can change this in the Setup > MIDI > Device ID).
The 02 means also that this is a MSC message, so don't change this one. The next 01 means that this message belongs to the category Lighting. The general Sound category is 10. The last 01 stands for the Command you want to trigger on the recieving device, 01 means GO. The last F7 is an end-of-message code and is needed as the last code in the message. Midi Show Control messages are basically Midi System Exclusive messages where the message types and commands are defined in the Midi standard.
So if you send this message to a Congo it will start the next crossfade, the same thing as pressing GO. Your sound guys could send this message to your Congo when a crossfade should start in sync with the sound. Remember to enable Midi Show Control in the Congo setup for this

The MSC GO message can also include info about which Preset (and which Seq) the crossfade should be made to, so that becomes a Goto. The beginning of the message is similar. Let's say we want to do a crossfade (Goto) to Preset 45 (that is in Seq 1) the command would be:
F0 7F 01 02 01 01 34 35 00 31 00 F7
The things that are new in this message is "34 35 00 31 00". 34 35 means Preset 45. The number of the preset (and Seq) needs to be entered as 3X where X is a number between 0-9. For example:
31 = 1
32 34 = 24
31 38 36 = 186
The 00 after "34 35" is a "break" command and means that what comes after the 00 is the next command.
The 31 in the example refers to the Sequence. Again 31 means Seq 1. And the last 00 means "break".

Depending on what type of software your sound guys have, making a Midi Show Control trigger in their software could be a lot easier. There might be a window where you could enter the Device ID, the Command (for example GO), the Cue number (=Preset), the CueList number (=Seq). This would then send a MSC message to trigger the Congo.

The Congo manual also lists the other MSC messages that Congo can recieve. Is short they are: GO, STOP (=Pause), RESUME and SET.

Triggering Sound equipment from Congo.
Depending on what messages your sound guys equipment can recieve you will need to change some of the settings in the message. For example a GO command sent to the Sound category would be:
F0 7F 01 02 10 01 F7
or when written in the Action Macro cell in the Seq:
MIDI 1 F0 7F 01 02 10 01 F7
But I have no knowledge on what type of message sound equipment like to recieve. So you will need to edit the message to match.
 
Controllers

Another thing that Congo can recieve (and send) is Controller messages.
Master 1 on Congo refers to Controller 65 (or 41 in Hex) and the values 0-127 refer to the level of the fader. To recieve (or send or both) Controllers on Congo you need to go to Setup > MIDI > Faders and change this setting to "Recieve" or "Transmit" or "Rec/Tra".
You could also control sound equipment with Controller messages. For example a fader on Congo could control a fader on a Sound console. I've seen this being done with a Yamaha M7CL console.

If you have a USB-MIDI interface for a computer you could have a look at the MIDI-OX program. It's a pretty comprehensive program for seeing what is transmitted on MIDI and can also do many other things. You could use this program to see what MIDI messages Congo or your sound guys equipment is sending. It helps a lot when trying out things. http://www.midiox.com/

Midi is a great and simple protocol for triggering (even if it might not look like that based on this description). But you will need to spend a little time trying out things and playing with Midi to understand what is what and how it works.

Hope this helps.

Oskar

I've been using my LS9 console (little brother to the M7CL) to trigger my Congo via midi through program change/scene selection for a while now.  It works really well, as long as you let the sequence step finish before triggering another step, then Congo gets confused and goes whatever step it wants to go to.  I just played with control change and linking faders from the Congo to the sound board and it works great (thanks for the tip, Oskar!).  Can't wait to screw with the sound guy at the next show!!!