VJ with a MIDI controller: any knob, in seconds

Plug in the controller, right-click the thing you want it to move, press Listen, turn the knob. That is the whole mapping story in Phosphor; the rest of this page is what you can map and the tricks that make a set feel played rather than clicked.

1. Learn a control

Every slider, button, pad, toggle and clip cell has a right-click menu with Listen. Press it, move a knob or hit a pad on the controller, and it is mapped; the control shows a small badge with what drives it. Right-click again to forget, invert, or set the range (a knob can sweep 20–80 % of a fader, or run backwards).

2. Clips and columns

Map pads to clip cells or to whole columns (one pad fires a column across every layer). Launch quantise (now / beat / bar) applies to pad presses too, so hits land on the beat. Trigger modes per clip: normal, toggle, flash (plays while held), piano.

3. Faders, crossfader, effects

Layer opacity, the master, the crossfader between layer groups, every effect parameter, generator parameters, output colour: all mappable. A knob can drive several controls at once through a control surface widget, each with its own range.

4. Modulate instead of turning

Right-click → Modulate puts an LFO, the audio level or a band, the beat, a step sequencer or an envelope on any value; map the knob to the modulation amount and you play the movement rather than the value. With AUTO tempo follow the LFOs lock to the music.

5. Feedback and other controllers

Controllers with lights get the state back (pads light when a clip plays, motorised faders follow). OSC works the same way (Listen, send a message), with OSC Query so TouchOSC and others discover the addresses; Phosphor exports a TouchOSC layout of your control surface. The keyboard is a controller too, and so is a phone through the Session panel's QR code.

Questions

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