Suggestions, please!

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rjmmusic

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As the Mastermind GT development continues, I encourage everyone to post any suggestions they might have. At the moment, the design is still fluid and pretty much anything can be changed. Have at it!
 
Hey Ron, I really like the Mastermind GT, but there's one thing I don't like about it. And this one thing are the small LCD screens above each switch. I think it will be quite difficult to read them in a live situation.
 
I just posted a little explanation on the displays in another message. They actually are reasonably readable in person (visible in sunglight, even), but I'm continuing to look at other possibilities. If there's something better, I will find it!
 
I would prefer to have a larger central LCD display, and just have color-changing LEDs to indicate the status of each switch. With a larger LCD, some of the information you are trying to display for each switch could be displayed in an abbreviated form in a centralized location. Just my two cents. :)

By the way, thank you very much for listening to your customers. I know that I personally emailed you over a year ago about a product such as this, and I expect whatever your final design is to become another industry-standard.
 
I did get a chance to see the Prototype at NAMM and am VERY excited about this device. I can see a pretty wide range of my customers (and ME!!!) using it as our primary control system not only for guitar rigs, but laptop based control of all sorts of audio and video systems.

The biggest advantage I see to the GT is those LCD displays above each button. For those who are concerned about being able to read them in a live environment, remember that the text on an LCD can be as large or small as the display itself allows. That is, each display COULD only show 3 letters if you wanted them to be really large, or multiple lines of text if you didn't need the size. I do agree that anything we can do to make these displays larger would be great. I'd suggest perhaps looking at some of NTTs new OLED based displays and perhaps even their OLED switches.

I'd also like to see a footpedal unit that uses SILENT, or at least very quiet switches. I know there are several manufacturers who make heavy-duty momentary switches which look pretty much like these standard pedal board switches, but are actually quite quiet. Having switches that make a significant "CL-ICK!" sound is awful when you are playing a quiet gig, or are switching presets between numbers. Sure, it doesn't matter at the Superdome when playing for 40,000 people, but if you intend to use this in conjunction with acoustic musicians, or at wedding gigs, or church gigs.... silent switches are important.

"Mathusula2" suggested an assignable expression pedal. I don't know if you saw this or not, but there are actually 6 expression pedal inputs on the back of the unit. That's plenty for me, and I'm an expression pedal freak (love em!). In fact, I'd really like a little break-away version of the LCD display that I could mount near each expression pedal which would display what each expression pedal is assigned to at any given time. I'm envisioning a little 2x2x2 box that connects to the back of the Mastermind GT in it's Ethernet based expansion port, and has a LCD display on top. You would simply program these "Expansion Display Modules" in the same way you program the display under each button. That would be ENORMOUSLY helpful.

I also agree with "ifailedshapes" in that a larger central LCD would be nice...but I do want to keep the text on each one of the button LCDs.

The ability to use one footpedal board to control everything, and to have the labels of each of the buttons and expression pedals change with each "preset" that is recalled would be the biggest single advancement in usability of footswitches that I have seen in....well.... pretty much forever.

Keep it going! I REALLY want to see this product come to market soon! I'll shout it's praises to the high heavens if it's even half as cool as I expect it to be.

That's my 11 cents worth today.
 
If the LCD displays above each button are too small, can you replace them by an image ? I'm explain, it's just to change words by images or combine both them. Just for an example, the lead channel can have an american flag in background or something like that or some color intensity: Green = Acoustic, Yellow = Crunch, Orange = Rhythmic 1, Red = Lead...I don't know, but if you associate the preset with an image or an image with word on it, it will be more easy to difference them !!!
 
The LCD screens above each footswitch are conventional 8x2 displays like you'll find on many products... just lit with RGB backlights so you can change the colour. So displaying an image or something would be tricky. Doing that on the main display would, I imagine, be somewhat easier...

That said, I spent quite a lot of time with the unit at the show (like, 20+ hours!) and despite my less than perfect vision and the less than perfect lighting, I could easily read the displays from a good distance away.
 
I wrote this on the wrong thread so I am pasting it here too..

Brother please dont make it all black...

The stage is dark enough already...
I just sold my TC electronics G system, what a lesson in frustration...
About the only thing I liked about it was that it wasn't black and therefore visible on stage I especially liked the huge oversized "lighted foot switches" . but ın my opinion the unit was internally designed by software guys who dont play guitar so I really couldnt relate to its "way of thinking" and I sold it.. but once again I like the visibility of a stage footcontroller that wasnt black..

I strongly suggest you dont make your unit all black.

anyway I was looking for an alternative foot controler and internet searches brought me here,
this is my first post... I look forward to being a customer of yours in the future when you release this new unit.. one last thing "for me personally banks of 5 dont cut it for me... I dont want to touch the footpedal too many times during a show... a bank of ten presets is more suited for most "touring professionals"..

also some nice female screws inserts mounted underneath the unit so it can be mounted on a pedal board etc... oh yes on last final , when you engage a switch it should chnsge color and stay that color as long as its in use... also lets say that you went to patch 9 from patch 1 and thus 9 is lit as on.. then if you press 9 again the unit should automatically go back to the previous patch in the case patch one... there should be a users mode where if the user wanted to he could select this feature... This way if I did a solo and wanted to get back to my main rhythm tone all I would do is press my "lit" solo patch button once again to go back. This ave valuables seconds on stage in the DARK when you are singing with sweat in your eyes... it save the day for me on my OLD GSP21 digitech which has this feature.

good luck brother God Bless and stay well
warmest regards
Awesome John
 
Have 1 of the 2 extra switches toggle the 6 presets into 6 IA switches. Have the other extra switch toggle between the last 2 presets selected. Have at lease 1 expression pedal jack. Provide expandability to another MGT. Enable phantom power capability in a 7-pin connector. Provide a software interface to change all settings in a computer which can also backup your settings. Make it smaller.
 
I've thought about this for a while and here's my .02 cents-


First, great use of new tech. Thanks for pushing the envelope. Soft displays and layout is a great step forward. For myself, I would prefer a smaller basic footprint with ports for optional expanders. Price is a bit of a concern here, and I would think a smaller, scalable base unit might keep the "buy in" cost down a bit. 12 "soft" switches with the option to add on would be plenty for my needs now and future, personally.

Also, while I love the idea of the on-board touch screen, do you think it might be easier to do a rotary hardware encoder and a few buttons, with a central OLED display or something? It just seems that with the fact that touch display quality/sensitivity keeps going up while size and weight go down, it seems a bit like buying today's brand new cell phone while realizing that in 3 months a better, cheaper version will hit the market. Also, since so many of the folks that will be interested in this already have I-phones, I-pads, Tablets, Smart phones, etc, are you sure that a editor app for existing touch-device operating systems isn't a more effective way to keep this controller relevant as the technology inevitably improves, and perhaps make it a bit more durable as well?

I love where you're going with this Ron! Can't wait to see the final product.
 
This is very similar to what I've been thinking about in a "dream" controller for my rig...
With that being said, I didn't see any details about SysEx communications, it would be nice for the unit to receive SysEx like my Roland FC200 does. With this in mind, if you set up switches for turning FX on/off or in bypass, the LCD above the switch could change state (color/text) so you knew what was going on with your rig.
I would like 2 built in expression pedals with LCDs above with switches under the pedal (like the Roland FC300), or maybe that could be for an expander board...
With the expander board idea, make it possible for more than one expander board, that way you could have more switches plus my expression pedal switch idea.
I'm with some on nixing the touch screen and using buttons/knobs, but what ever keeps the cost lower.
Not a fan of black for the color, medium or dark grey would be nice.
I like the soft switches like Roland uses, but I've been using those for the past...20+ years.
Other than that, looks very promising and I'm more than interested in this.
 
By their nature, Sysex messages are specific to each manufacturer, so we can't really have a general purpose solution for Sysex. However, I'd like to support certain popular effects processors as much as possible, especially those that have advanced features (two-way sync between controller and processor, patch name download, etc.). This will have to be done on a case by case basis. There's no plug and play standard for MIDI (yet!)
 
If we'd can choose the color of the LCD case(like yellow=preset, blue=effect, or anything like that) that'd be very cool !!!
 
Cpt Flake said:
If we'd can choose the color of the LCD case(like yellow=preset, blue=effect, or anything like that) that'd be very cool !!!

Done! (The prototype does this already) :)
 
19" wide x 14" deep x 3.5" high at the back. (48 x 35 x 9cm)

This, like everything else, is subject to change, but we're pretty set on the number of buttons so the size will probably not change significantly.
 
So there seems to be some concern about being able to see the LCD displays from a distance in the dark.

If theses are standard 8x2 display modules, it might be good to use the kind that support either: Two Lines of 8 characters, or One line of 6 much larger characters. This way, those people who are going to really need super large lettering can use the "one line" mode.

Some folks were mentioning SysEx. I, too, would love to see SysEx supported for a few devices: Fractal FX and the Roland VG-99 are two great places to start as both of these devices makes pretty good use of SysEx.

I'd also like to stress that any product I carry around with me now has to be LIGHT. REALLY REALLY REALLY light. I just cannot see paying an extra $50-$200 every time I get on an airplane simply to cover over weight baggage anymore. In fact, many of my clients 100% insist on making their entire gutiar rigs (other than amps) small enough to carry on the airplane with them. Now, I don't really expect many people to do so with a GT...but please do keep weight in mind while creating this product. Heavy does not equal good.
 
The mastermind GT can be use with an Axe-FX ??? Instead of a MFC-101 ??? I want to buy an Axe-FX soon and I want a MM GT as Midi pedalboard.
 
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