I recently purchased a Meeblip because I wanted a project to work on with my maker friends that I get together with every week. I decided to buy the full build-it-yourself kit, which meant I was in for a fair amount of soldering and so forth. Anyway, that all finally came together and I plugged it into my computer to see if I could control it with a MIDI track in Reaper. Yup! You sure can!

However, what you can’t do is create an envelope for any old MIDI CC message. You can put CC messages into the MIDI clips themselves, but that’s not very conducive to doing the kind of automation I’m used to doing with bass synth VSTs. It turns out that Reaper comes with a JS effect called MIDI_CCRider, which allows you to put an LFO on any CC message you want. I was able to look up which CC message was filter cutoff for the Meeblip and automate it using that effect. But this was not great because it meant that I’d need an instance of the effect for every parameter I wanted to control and that I’d have to constantly remind myself which CC messages controlled which parameters of the synth. So, instead, I decided to use that effect as the basis for a new JS effect that would have all that information baked into it and simply give me a bunch of sliders and combo boxes labeled the same as on the Meeblip. And voila:

The effect only sends a CC message when the value of a slider changes. This means that you can use it to set some initial values and then play with the knobs on the Meeblip while you loop a bassline. Only parameters of the effect that you choose to automate with an envelope will be constantly overridden. If you’d like to try it out with your Meeblip, you can grab it from Github: https://gist.github.com/3606021