Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.
-- The entire Ig Nobel awards ceremony welcoming speech
KeyMaster is a MIDI processing and patching system. It allows a musician to reconfigure a MIDI setup instantaneously and modify the MIDI data in real time.
With KeyMaster a performer can split controlling keyboards, layer MIDI channels, transpose them, send program changes and System Exclusive messages, limit controller and velocity values, and much more. At the stomp of a foot switch (or any other MIDI event), an entire MIDI system can be totally reconfigured.
KeyMaster lets you describe songs, which are lists of patches that connect instruments. Those connections can send program changes, set keyboard splits, transpose, filter messages and controllers, and send volume or other controller changes.
Chains let you organize songs into set lists for live performance or in the studio.
Any incoming MIDI message can trigger an action such as moving to the next or previous patch or song. For example, you can tell KeyMaster to move forward or backward based on controller values coming from foot switches or an instrument’s buttons.
Any array of MIDI bytes can be stored as a named message which can be sent via a trigger or a key press. NOT YET IMPLEMENTED
A software panic button turns off any stuck notes.
KeyMaster is by Jim Menard. It is a rewrite of PatchMaster, in Objective C for the Mac OS. The Github repo is here.
Since there’s no binary version of KeyMaster yet, you’ll need to compile the code. To do so, you’ll need the command line developer tools that come with XCode.
Download the source code. Type “make”.
Type “make test”.
./keymaster -l
Lists all of the “real” MIDI inputs and outputs on your system. You’ll need to do this to get the names of the instruments.
./keymaster keymaster_file
Starts KeyMaster and loads keymaster_file.