I’ve absolutely no idea why it’s taken me so long to explore the midi control of the HX. For years I’ve been building DIY midi controllers and while they have (mostly) worked, it’s taken hours of work and the results are hardly to a professional standard. What started me off was using an m-vave chocolate controller, initially to direct select 4 snapshots. It’s a shame the HX doesn’t remember the preset you came from. This had me reading through the midi commands that worked on the HX and my eyes were opened!

I’ve now set up a bank for controlling the looper on ableton. Having only 6 switches forces you to select only the most useful commands, but I’ve also mapped all the controls to my launchpad. Really, the only one I need “by foot” is record in order to (try and) sync the guitar phrase to the music, but I’m used to using my feet with the looper, so my hands can look after the FX processing applied to the loop. It’s exactly like playing an instrument to my way of thinking. Since the “midi” footswitches are then not available for block bypass, I’ve added the basic blocks for my sound and switched them all on. The m-vave is now jumping direct to the loop bank plus snapshot inc/decrement (such a shame the HX doesn’t show snapshot number in the scribble strip – the line6 ideas forum has closed down, sadly)

I then tried using midi notes and yes, you can trigger (single) notes using the HX. I suspect these will be low mellotron drones 😉