Coming back from Delft’s gig on Sunday, I realised how much the Kaoss pad had become an intrisic part of my live sets. Rather than use it as an obvious effect on the master output, I love using the Kaoss pad on the mixer’s send. It allows to grab part of the running track and “play” with it pretty much like an instrument. It’s a great way to play with tension and make the track evolve without touching too much the original structure.

So far, I’ve been mainly using the mini-KP and one looper program, and it’s been great. But now that I’m starting to get hold of my “kaoss technique”, I feel like extending the number of presets available to me. The KP3 has 8 of them, which is already a big step up, but the other day, as I went through the miniKP’s programs in the bus, I found there was a lot of the presets that could be interesting to use in various contexts…

So I started thinking on how to extend the number of presets and organise them in a relevant fashion. With that respect, the layout of my beloved faderfox LX1 seemed perfect because it would allow me to organise the original programs of the KP3 and build separate rows for ‘delays & reverbs’, ‘synths & noise’,  ‘phaser & granulizers’ and so on. All I needed is to find a way to make the LX & KP communicate. Fortunately, the KP3 responds to program changes for program selection so using a midi interface connected to an eeepc (god, I love those 701), I can run Midi-OX and build a translation map between the lx’s button and whatever effect I decide to use.

FX galore, here I come !