OK, a little more on navigation:
The last tip was all about how using an absolute (0-127) MIDI CC to control scene navigation is less than ideal, but it turns out there’s also a way you can use that to your advantage.
The trick is in knowing that sending a 0 or a 127 to the numeric scene navigator will immediately take you to the top or the bottom of your set. So, for example, in a set like mine, I can stack up a bunch of extra DJ tracks loops, or what have you at the very bottom of my set and assign a button to jump there with a single click.
The problem if you do this is that you lose the ability to navigate through the scenes as described in the last tip. Unfortunately, you can’t map two different controllers to a single onscreen control. If you have a programmable controller, you can have two controls send the same CC and channel, but that won’t work in this case because one of them needs to be relative, and the other one absolute.
With the VCM-600 this isn’t a problem because of the way the dedicated scene navigation knob works. I’m not sure if this will be relevant to other controllers, but I’m throwing it in just in case.
The scene navigation knob on the VCM sends note messages. It’s an endless encoder that clicks when you turn it. When you click it to the left, it sends one note and when you click it to the right, it clicks a different one.
Therefore, if you manually map it to the scene navigators you use the up/down arrows – not the numeric control.
This leaves the numeric navigator free for the trick described above.
