This is a sneaky little one – How to use a playstation pad to control abelton (or any joystick) by using the joystick as a midi controller (you can control any other music making program that can do midi using this method too)

I use a playstation pad to play oldschool games on my pc (using zsnes emulator) ive got one of those little usb convertor thingies so the playstation pad gets recognised as a regular joystick by my machine..

But I wanted to use it as a midi controller.

There are three things you need

• one is called MJOY (http://otk.it/mjoy/)
• one is called midi-yoke (http://www.midiox.com/)
• the other is called MIDI-OX (http://www.midiox.com/)

You need to install all of them.

mjoy is a little program that takes the input from any joystick and puts it out to a midi port. midi-yoke is a program that makes an internal midi patchbay so that you dont need to mess with loads of cables. midi-ox is a program that lets you see midi messages (not really needed, but it helps.)

Once they are installed open up midi-ox

If you move a midi controller thats connected to your midi in port then you will get something like this

That just shows the midi control messages from your keyboard or whatever you pressed (it wont work with the joypad yet !)

Leave midi-ox open and open up MJOY

I picked the input for my joypad to be midi yoke 1 and the output to be midi yoke 2 (dont let them be the same thing, or it complains)
a little explination of this program – there are buttons for
X (X-axis of your joystick)
Y (Y-axis)
Z (Z axis)
a few other axis buttons and some roman numerals (for the square, circle, triangle, X buttons)

There is a channel knob, and a CC/Note knob a min value and a max value also.

I just left the channel set to 1 – you can pick any. For the CC/Note you need to change it for every action – so the X axis can be CC 1 and the Y axis can be CC2 – that way you get different controls for each axis and button.

To add a control just pick the buttons and the channel and the not then hit the + symbol.

You should also see midi-ox spew out some more control information. add all the axes and the buttons form your pad.

Thats you done. You can now enable that midi controller in any midi program (it will be ‘plugged in’ to midi yoke 1 as its port. You can close midi-ox but remember to keep MJOY open.