Cubase 12 - Arturia Minilab mk2 problems

Hi,

I have some problems with my arturia minilab mk2 in Cubase 12:

  • my pad backlights are always turned off as soon as I start Cubase, i prefer to have them on so any way to fix this?

  • I can not set the pads on the minilab to use transport controls like Play / Stop / Cycle etc. - what is up with that? The pads are black in the midi editor, meaning I can’t even click on the to assign things, but if I disable the built in script I can start building my own script and then the pads work as transport functions.

Hi @simono85, we didn’t want the pads to steal the midi messages from the tracks. They are supposed to be used to trigger plain note events. That’s why they are NOT bound to MIDI Remote. The surface shows only “blind panels” in that section.

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Hi @Jochen_Trappe thank you for your message!

Can you confirm that there is nothing I can do for these 2 issues?
Any ideas on having the pad backlights stay on?

Bit of a bummer, as now I see that only Arturia keyboards have the pads disabled in Midi remote. Not sure I would’ve rushed to get this update if this would’ve been noted somewhere…

thanks

Hi @simono85, I think it the case what disabling the script is for. So, please go to the MIDI Remote Manager and disable the script. Then create your own using the Surface Editor. Is probably better, but DONT create buttons for the Trigger Pads. Just leave them out.

After scrying many forums, and I might be wrong with this statement because I haven’t tested it out myself.
It looks like the only way to this is to scripting it yourself by adding a new MIDI controller surface, and making a script with the MIDI Remote API with Javascript (ES5). The guide can be found under a tab called “Scripting Tools” in your MIDI Remote panel.

The lighting ports are: (forum page: Control Pad LED's with Midi)

In order to change the Pad color send this SysEx message to “Arturia MiniLab mkII” MIDI output port - F0 00 20 6B 7F 42 02 00 10 7n cc F7
Where:
n is the pad number, 0 to F, corresponding to Pad1 to Pad16
cc is the color:
00 - black
01 - red
04 - green
05 - yellow
10 - blue
11 - magenta
14 - cyan
7F - white

Sadly this is the only way I can find how to do it thus far. Remember that Cubase 12 with the new MIDI template just got released, so if we’re lucky there will be more templates or user made scripts available in the near future.

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Hi @Jochen_Trappe!
I’m finding it hard to let this topic die because I really wished to be able to use the pads on the minilab as an interface controller, could you elaborate on why the pads are a bad idea to use as buttons?

I can see that using them in their standard settings with Arturia’s MIDI Control Center (MCC) would be hard due to the preset is listing them as MIDI notes, but the thing that makes me find this statement confusing is that on the MCC you can remap them to send to CC. (at least on the Minilab MKii) giving you giving you the 16 knobs + 2 of them being down click, and 2 more if you press the shift button (20 total CC signals on the buttons alone) then 16 pads. and mod wheel being change able. that’s 37 CC buttons that can be used on the controllers on one memory bank.

if you want to step this up further, the minilab have also 7 usable memory banks, and before stopping me there because that go way over the 127 CC usable… you can also assign each of them to up to 16 Channels.
I did a soft test on it in the surface editor and it did map them easily and not setting off any MIDI note.

@simono85 asked about the backlights turning off, the only thing I can see that made it do that was because the included script for the Arturia did not turn them on and overwrites your settings in MCC. if disabling this script the pads lights up and works fine. The only thing I haven’t checked out is the possibility to trigger RGB effects for the pads as e.g. having a red record button blink when recording, which would be possible if the program started a script sequence to change the color turning it off and on. but this so far is just hypothetical because I have not tested it due to a lack of experience with Javascript.

This was maybe a bit long, but I’d love to hear why this wouldn’t work to script into the standard setting.

Best Regards.
Windlancer

Edit
They have made this all possible within Ableton Live which it was flagged with, so if it isn’t some software inability within cubase I don’t see why this would not work

Even though using the pads as MIDI notes as you stated in an earlier comment, it would be nice to have more options with maybe having one memory preset to use for beat pad, and another memory setting for controlling something else.

Thanks @Windlancer , I am also puzzled by all this.
To be honest I wasn’t sure what else to say after the suggestion was “don’t use it then” …

@simono85 Well after looking more into it, I would say it’s not like you shouldn’t use it.
more between the line that it might conflict other plug-ins.
The Minilab uses Midi channels to send messages that Cubase reads to adjust the shortcuts you set.
The minilab can send up to 127 control changes (CC) on 16 different channels (says keyboard midi ch on your minilab) pressing shift+pad is just a visual way to se which channel you are on by the lighting feature.

Even though I’m not too sure about it, but as Jochen commented that it would conflict with other MIDI channels used by other controllers like e.g. synths, digital piano, midi interfaces etc.
if this was all there was to it, it wouldn’t be any problems… but Cubase also uses MIDI channels for their VSTs as far as I can make out of it. this would mean that if you make a project needing 36 different instrument tracks. the chance would be that your interface would interfere with the signals… thinking every time the for example the violin was going to hit C4# it would think that you wanted to open for example “mute all”. by having more buttons this might happen more often.

Do you know if there is a similar sysex string for the minilab (original version, not v2)?

@DodgingRain I don’t really know because I don’t own that model so I can’t check out either.
There aren’t a lot of threads out there for everything… the one I found was for keylab, which they say use mostly the same string as minilab mk2.
As far as I know you can use the MCC (midi control center) program with minilab mk1, if you go in there and press CTRL + M (or enable it in the view tab) you get a line on the bottom of your screen that. Press any button on your minilab and you will see a SysEx string. Ch and CC and the preset name for that channel.

There are a lot of threads on Arturia’s forums and I’ve seen a lot of techies playing around and sharing their finds there, so it might be a better place to ask. Either that or you have to play around with the strings you get from MCC with Midi Ox or Snoize’s SysEx Librarian (only for Mac) thus far I haven’t found out if Cubase are able to send SysEx messages to your keyboard, so the only way is to have one of those programs open in the background.

Good luck!

Hi @Windlancer,
i have a similar problem with it, do you have a script that works well? if so, is it possible to share it? i’d like the pads’ backlight for orientation which knob i have to turn, so it would be very nice if it is possible! but thank you for the already enlighting comments so far

Hi @jackamo
I tried to go down the rabbit hole of scripting it myself, but I’m no programmer, and hitting wall after wall and ended up just scrapping it.

It’s not the problem of making the color change really, but since I’m using multiple controllers I got into the overlap problem of conflicting midi-signals. And it got a bit too complicated. And since then I upgraded to a Komplete Controller Mk 2 that satisfied what I wanted.

So I’m sorry for not being able to help much.
Though, if you could elaborate about what you wanted it to do, I can take a look into it.

Hi, thanks for the fast response! I meant that the minilab has a bunch of knobs where you cant really recognise fast which number it is, so i wanted to color-code the pads to know which is the right knob (i set it in the midi control center 1-8: red-blue-blue-red-blue-blue-red-blue and 9-16 the other way around, so that you could easy count in 3er steps)

If you only want the lights to stay on with the presets you made in the MCC I do have a script, just gonna run it and test if it works.

If you want it to be able to speak with Cubase so that cubase changes the colors then it might be a bit more comlicated

nah i dont need cubase to change its colors, it would be sufficient if they would be just on. im currently doing my own midi controller instead of the official, we’ll see if it works

rn it seems that i got working what i wanted, although it was a ton of useless work

Sorry for the delay, hit a snatch not getting my controller to be turned on.

Ok! So in MCC, remember to turn on your backlight in settings.
You need to set your knobs as “Absolute” or your knobs will get stuck and won’t really move from 0-127… but only between like on/off… sadly Memory 1 is latched with first row of knobs being stuck to relative mode.

You might want to test the knobs being configured to the right CC/MIDI so that they work on your controller.

And lastly remember to disable Steinberg’s own script.

Arturia_MiniLab mkII - Knobs Only.midiremote (3.9 KB)

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Basically what it is is an overlay building on the “make it yourself” thing and not resetting the data on your MiniLab

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