How To Map A Note To MIDI Controller

[Rocket545]

How can I get it to where I press a button on my MIDI Controller (Which is an Akai LPD8) and it makes a note sound.

For example:
If I press button 1 it makes the sound of a C3 and it holds out that sound until I press button 1 again to cut it off.

Sorry if I don't know all the technical terms or am not making any sense..

Thanks for all your help!

[chibear]

See if THIS helps. I haven't done notes per se but have related command codes to a knob using this technique. For the sustain portion, I really don't know unless you program the sustain pedal command code to one of your knobs and then turn it off/on there.

EDIT: I didn't check the link before posting The search result doesn't have a unique URL so just search 'control surfaces' in the manual. Sorry about that.

[Rocket545]

Hey thanks for your reply! I tried searching the manual but couldn't find any information on where I go to assign my control surfaces to my controller.

[Juno]

If I press button 1 it makes the sound of a C3 and it holds out that sound until I press button 1 again to cut it off.

That's gonna be hard. To play any note, a midi Note On message for that note is sent, and to stop it, a midi Note Off message is sent. These messages are sent by the master that you use, in your case the Akai (although you can record them in Mixcraft like other midi, and then use Mixcraft to send it to another channel/instrument, but that's beside the point).
Those messages are of the type "system exclusive" and not "control changes". The latter are pretty easy to deal with, but sysex is not so easy.

Have a look at this page:
http://www.midi.org/techspecs/midimessages.php

-In table 2, you'll find the sysex for channel specific Note ON and Note Off messages (incl. note numbers and velocity values), but the use of this sysex is hightly subject to compatibility issues. It may or it may not work or it may do something completely unexpected.

-The manual of the Akai should tell you how to assign and transmit a sysex message.

-For each note you want to play/stop this way, you'd need a unique controller/controller position. You'll quickly find that this becomes a very large and complicated job

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The control surfaces will not allow you to do this either. This is what happens there: you turn a knob, or press a button, or move a slider, and Mixcraft then tries to receive the value of that action. If that works, you can tell Mixcraft how to respond to that action.

However, this just works for CC type messages. That means you can use your mod wheel to adjust velocity, or you can use a slider to turn down the volume, or you can use a knob to playback the project, or use a rotary button to adjust effect parameters. But you cannot tell Mixcraft to play a note that way, because that is not a CC type message but a system exclusive message.

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One final thing: it's possible that there are keyboards that allow such programming on the keyboard itself (but i don't know of any). Meaning: by programming the keyboard, you might be able to swap functions for buttons around. The keyboard itself is then capable of using any button to play any notes (most keyboards allow only the musical keyboard for playing notes).
In theory you could then assign a slider position to a note and that note would keep playing as long as the slider is in that position.
The manual of your keyboard should tell you about this possibility.