New user and continuons controller question

Hello,

I am new on this forum and will therefore introduce myself.

Having been playing guitar for about 35 years, I have gone through quite a lot of gear. I now use a small rack with TC Electronics G/System on a Mesa Boogie SimulClass 295 power and a few other items like a tuner, rack interface, etc.

I have brought the HK GM36 as a small gig amp alternative and it looks like it migh also find it's place in my rack at some point.

The question :
I have hooked a volume controller that I assigned to CC #20 (gain soft). When using it the controller will sweep through the full gain range versus 0 to the preset value (which in my case I want to be the maximum).

Is there any way to set that up ?

Thanks in advance

Marc

This has been discussed at length time and time again among GM36 owners. While the midi volume function is swell (.....see what I did there? lol), the achilles heel of it is what you have experienced. The only way around that is if your controller can be programmed for a min or max value. The maximum midi command value is 128, so 128 is max volume. I set mine to 88 if I remember correctly, which is the equivalent of having the volume at about 7.

If what I say here is wrong I'm sure the others will correct me and you can just ignore this.

What you could do as a workaround is to add another pot of about the same resistance as your pedal in the line in series with it.  This could be a little preset carefully added inside the pedal.  This should be fine as long as it is relatively low resistance.  TC quote some as low as 10k and say keep it below 25k if possible.  If you put it effectively "above" the pedal in series with it it will then limit the top level of the DC range the pedal normally creates according to how you set it.  For calibration of maximum volume you simply set it to 0ohms and toe the pedal to the max.  The you can lift its setting to cut off some of the upper voltage range.  It may conceivably be necessary to fiddle with the value and maybe a parallel resistor to keep the overall resistance within the acceptable range if you want a really low maximum but it is doable.

Another possibility is to set up a simple pedal with only a number of switches, each one having a preset volume increase.  You can just kick the one you want into place when you need it.

Does any of that fit the bill and something you could do yourself?

Thanks guys,

Yes I can easily fix the max resistance of the volume controller but that will not really suit my needs as it would require that all presets I use have a common max gain value.

I'll use my guitar volume for now and hopefully HK will add this in a future firmware version.

Thanks

Marc

I see what you mean Marc. Hadn't realised you wanted to be able to change the maximum dynamically for each patch. Have you realised that the GM36 has two basic volume controls, a Master Volume and a Volume? These two actually appear to do the same thing but they are in very different parts of the circuit. They do both come after the Gain control and the valve stages and tone controls however. The Volume comes before the Fx loop, Presence, Resonance and Reverb with the Master Volume coming after them. Anyhow, the idea is to set your Master Volume to whatever general volume you need for the place you are playing keeping in mind that this is not altered by the patches as you select them. You balance up each of your patches for loudness with the Volume control which IS retained as part of each patch settings when you Store it.

With this in mind you can use the Volume to set the overall maximum level you want on a patch by patch basis. Just set up a new patch for tone and gain for example with your pedal on maximum, balance it against your existing patches with the Volume control then store it. It will retain that level setting every time it is selected and hence every patch will be increased or reduced by the Master Volume balanced against each other. Effectively your pedal is setting to a different maximum for each stored patch.

Indeed that works however I wanted to control the gain setting or distortion level.
I've asked HK to come up with a min/max midi cc implementation per preset.

Let's see if that comes.

Thanks anyway.

Cheers
Marc