PadKontrol Transport Control

Korg likes to go on about the PadKontrol’s transport control abilities, but never really mentions how to actually set it up. So, here’s how I got my PadKontrol to send play, stop and record MMC messages to my sequencing software. 

 

The PadKontrol has one button labeled ‘Message’, which you probably never use. Holding down the Message button and pressing one of pads 1-8 will send a MIDI message to the software or whatever the PadKontrol is hooked up to. The first three pads send Panic, Note Off and GM On messages, while the next five can be configured to send any MIDI message. 

You’ll need the PadKontrol Editor Librarian software, which you can find on Korg’s website. It won’t work if you have your sequencer open while running the editor. From the MIDI menu, select ‘Edit Global Data’, and the Global Edit window will pop up. By typing in a hexadecimal code into the User Message field, you can get the PadKontrol to send whatever MIDI message, so we’ll have to find the hex codes for MMC messages. A quick trip to wikipedia brings up a list of MMC commands and their hex codes.  

An MMC message (that is sent to, or generated by, an MMC device) is: 

F0 7F deviceID 06 command F7  

The third byte is the Device ID.
The fifth byte is the command:
01 Stop
02 Play
03 Deferred Play
04 Fast Forward
05 Rewind
06 Record Strobe (Punch In)
07 Record Exit (Punch out)
08 Record Ready (Record Pause)
09 Pause
0A Eject
0B Chase
0F MMC Reset
40 Write
44 Locate/Go to
47 Shuttle

  

I don’t know what the deviceID is supposed to be, so I just used 00, and that seemed to work. The only commands I was really interested in were play, stop and record, but there are three different record commands. Through trial and error, I found that the Record Strobe (Punch In) command did what I wanted.  So, the record message looks like F0 7F 00 06 06 F7.  

 Then I typed the MMC message  into the box for the pad that I wanted to send that message and pressed enter to confirm. You can’t just type it in and click away, you have to press enter for it to remember. When I was all done, I pressed Transmit and tested it out.  Here’s a screenshot of the editor window with all the messages typed in.  

  

The MMC Messages

 

  

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