I broke down and bought Bome's Midi Translator, and have been having some success with mapping the ground control buttons to keystrokes. If you haven't used anything like his before, it's a little daunting, but if you follow the instructions here:
http://www.bome.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=509
They are much easier to follow than the Bome's Manual, who, like so many of these manuals, doesn't seem to make any sense until you've figured out most of it on your own.
Ahem. I'm looking at you, JohnClark, and your Laboratory of Voodoo. Fortunately a couple hours of perusing YouTube, 50 excited teenagers on video later, and I was able to understand some of it.
ANYHOW-
Now that I have finally understood what the difference is between "10 presets/bank" and "4 presets/Bank"*
Since I am remapping all of the commands to keystrokes in any case, I would like to change the [-/No] and [+/Yes] buttons to static assignments, so that I can assign them functions. There way that they scroll through the presets in 10Preset/bank mode isn't very useful to me.
Likewise, having only 4 buttons change function in 4Presets/bank means the easy buttons become useful, but the 8 static assignments are going to require me to jump between a million patches.
Hey, If I could just flip the board around 180°, so that the bank buttons were on the top left, and the scroll buttons were out of my way, I'd be pretty psyched.
I'm a big, clumsy fellah, and after some single malt and two hours playing, it becomes harder and harder to balance on one foot and daintily press a button on the third row from the back in my size 13EE shoes.
So: is there a way to assign something to the [-/No] and [+/Yes] buttons so they have their own values? I guess what I'd love is not 10 Presets/bank, but
12 Presets/bank.
*And for those still confused by this, let me pay a little karma forward by explaining them.
10 Presets/Bank:
Each one of the buttons, labeled in
small numbers
1, 2, 3... up to 9, 0 gets its own unique code. The -/No and +/Yes buttons can be used to scoll up and down these presets numerically. Each time you change banks, each button, 1 through 0, gets a completely different assignment.
4 Presets/Bank:
The four buttons along the bottom, labeled 1 through 4 in
large numbers, each get a unique code. HOWEVER, the buttons labeled 1 through 8 in
small numbers, get fixed codes- so no matter which bank you are in, though 8 buttons always send the same commands.
Since I'm using this for controlling Ableton Live, I can guess (but not verify) why these modes exist. So, I'll leave it to you to troll YouTube- i think you can find some answers there.