Midi Fighter Twister: Building an Ableton Live Script

One of the most popular Midi Controllers amongst our users here on remotify is the classic offering from DJ Techtools, the Midi Fighter Twister. This amazingly compact controller provides you with 16 hi-resolution, grippable, push button encoders which are just begging for you to add to your custom Ableton Live setup. 


Why the Midi Fighter Twister is an awesome Ableton Controller

The fact that it provides ring feedback for each rotary and RGB feedback for the push buttons means you can receive a lot of informative feedback from Ableton Live directly on the unit itself. Scripts created with the Control Surface Studio Editor automatically update a controller's LEDs whenever there is a change in Live. So if you’re using the Twister with a Red Box for example, and you move the red box around your session, the Twister's LEDs will automatically update when you change tracks i.e. lets say you have an encoder set to control the Volume then the ring LED positions will automatically update when you switch tracks. 
 The wealth of options available on this controller made the Twister a perfect candidate for our first pre-built Control Surface Studio script offering (but definitely not the last!).

A little bit of background

The script we decided to build is actually a port of an older script called 'SendStorm' which remotify.io founder John Carney built many years ago as his first experiment in to the world of Ableton scripting. 
Back then the only way to create a control surface script was to spend a number of weeks/months wrestling with Live's frustratingly undocumented API, going through endless trial and error or code writing until he finally reach a point where he had a working script complete with the controls he needed.

Things have changed a lot since then, Control Surface Studio now provides a visual editor for creating custom scripts without needing to touch the code itself, this makes script creating a breeze and takes the script building process from weeks down to minutes.

Configuring Midi Data in Control Surface Studio

Our new build of the SendStrom script uses the already pre-configured Midi Fighter Twister Controller Template (thanks to member Stevan for his work on this). If you're not familiar with how Control Surface Studio works, you configure all of the Inputs and MIDI Data for a controller separately inside the 'Controller manager' area. This is separate from where you add the controls for the script (the Script Manager).

You also get a visual representation of the Midi Controller which you use when selecting controls for each mapping in your script. You only ever need to configure the settings of a Midi Controller one time and then you can continuously build scripts for it. As we already have a complete 4 bank controller configuration setup for the Midi Fighter Twister, I could skip the controller configuration part and go straight into building the script.

What does our Ableton Twister Script do?

The focus of our script is to provide access to all 12 sends for the selected track inside Ableton. As default scripts for most MIDI Controllers limit users with access to just a couple of sends at most, this script provides a much more complete mixer setup. 
 The 12 sends are split into 2 modes. Mode 1 controls sends 1 - 6 over 6 encoders and Mode 2 uses those same 6 encoders to control sends 7 - 12. The top left button on the Twister switches between the 2 modes. 
 As well as this, the SendStorm script also provides selected track control for Volume, Panning, Mute, Solo and Arm down the 4th column of Encoders on the Twister. This combination means you have full mixer control of the selected track. There are also 2 buttons assigned to moving the selected track left and right. 
 The bottom 6 encoders are dedicated to selected device control (on the selected track). Similar to how the 12 sends work, the 6 encoders control the first 12 device parameters and are split into 2 banks which you can switch between using the 2 Device Bank Selectors. 


The best part is you can import our script into Control Surface Studio and customise it to your own specific needs. Maybe you want to add Device Navigation left/right or add more Device Banks. Or maybe you want to add a third Mode which adds a Red Box and gives you control over 4 Tracks at one in Ableton, the choice is totally up to you!


Watch us build the script live!

We recorded a video of us building this actual script from start to finish in Control Surface Studio. You can see how easy it is to create a powerful script like SendStorm and will help to give you ideas on how to build your own.

SendStorm is available for free to all Control Surface Studio users. you can download it from the SendStorm page. Or you can import it directly from inside CSS by going to the Script Manager > import section and clicking import on the SendStorm script.

Click here to learn more about how you can create your perfect Ableton Live MIDI setup with Control Surface Studio.