Is there a way to use Orac as a pedalboard for incoming audio? I know it’s possible to manipulate effects in the chain by hopping around with key presses, but is there a way to trigger individual effects in the chain via footswitch? I’ve been using Orac regularly for a few months now, but only in its self contained, vanilla form. This is my first venture into running guitar into it and it would be awesome to have a setup with a few effects to trigger via footswitch as opposed to a constant stream of effects, or clumsily trying to play guitar and shortcuts on the Organelle at once.
It’s definitely possible. You’ll need some kind of MIDI foot controller to do it however and probably need to mess around with Pure Data to get it set up. I use a Blackstar MIDI Pro Logic personally for use with my looper program but you may want to opt for a bigger one.
I think Orac has ways of dealing with program changes directly so you can scroll through different programs but there is usually not a bypass option built in most patches so you will need to code that in. Luckily, it’s pretty straight forward. I can provide an example of how you can parse MIDI CC messages for use in Pure Data if that would be helpful.
That would be awesome to see examples for a bypass option. I’ve just gotten so used to the fx modules on Orac that it would be too time consuming (and expensive) to recreate them with individual physical pedals, but for the sake of performing it would be nice to trigger fx individually.
I thought of this after seeing someone using a norns with a super basic 4 switch midi controller, but the Blackstar option looks nice and substantial. I really appreciate the guidance, thank you!
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What effects are you mostly using? I’ll show an option with one of them and hopefully it should apply nicely to the others
I’m a fan of good ol Slicer and Clds. The prospect of this working is really exciting, I really appreciate it.
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This is the general idea of how you would make a bypass. This is in Slicer and you should be able to copy this directly to get it to work.
To use the MIDI from your devices, you will use the ctlin object. Note that this is a global way of getting MIDI so if you are using other controllers they may conflict. To prevent this, we will listen to a specific channel. In this case, it’s 5 in red.
Next we only want it to perform the action when a specific MIDI CC is active as well. In this case, it’s 1 in blue. From there, any time there is a value of 127 on that specific CC at that specific channel, it will bang a toggle. The toggle will then send a signal of 1 or 0 depending on the toggle state which is then multiplied with the effected signal effectively turning it on or off which is shown in green.
To my knowledge, this process should be the same for just about every effect. There should still be some pass through audio still so you should still hear your guitar but the effect will be gone. There are also some number boxes and other things you could leave out if you wanted.
Hope this has helped and be sure to do a demo video when you get it up and running!
This is awesome. In the past it’s been a bit intimidating to open pd, but this is really straightforward. I wasn’t sure how possible this was going to be so it’s nice to have this broken down in relative layman’s terms. I’ll get cracking on this asap and record my underwhelming guitar playing as things progress! Thanks again.
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No problem 
A lot of it comes down to googling to see if some one else has had your problem, looking to see how other patches work and grafting pieces, and good ol’ trial and error. Glad I could be of help!