Jamstik MFC1

MIDI pedals are more sophisticated and configurable today than they once were, which is great news. But it does mean the quality of the setup software is really important...

There was a time, not so very long ago, when a MIDI floor controller that did anything more than just send Program Change messages was considered something really sophisticated. Increasingly, however, MIDI foot controllers are expected to be fully programmable and able to send whatever MIDI messages your devices may be able to receive and process. Which means, of course, that you have to be able to programme them, and that’s not everybody’s metaphorical cup of tea. Device‑specific controllers, pre‑programmed with the necessary commands to make the most of a particular unit, give the user the satisfaction of being ‘immediately usable’, but you’d always want the option to do some programming of your own. And exactly how much fun that is, or isn’t, is what divides the men from the boys in this world.

Fortunately, the MFC1, from Jamstik — the people who, in my opinion, make the world’s best MIDI guitars — is programmable from the company’s Creator control app: the same one that works with their MIDI guitars. You can program directly on the unit itself, of course, but you may not actually want to once you’ve tried doing it from the app. Being, as I am, from an era when you had to be happy fiddling about in hexadecimal if you wanted to do anything out of the ordinary with MIDI, I count myself well versed in this stuff... but these days, I have to admit, if I know that I want to program a specific action with a unit like this, I’d much rather just find it in the Creator software ‘actions library’ and assign it to an on‑screen control destination rather than having to try to recall exactly which CC does what, and is it ‘0x7fH’ for ‘On’, or is that ‘Off’? The world has moved on.

Well...