HOWTO toggle special LEDs on LaunchControl X MK2 (Ableton live 11)

Here’s a guide to have the special LED’s for “Device”, “Mute”, … and the rest of the knobs controlled by the sysex-commands, as described in the Novation LaunchControl programmer’s reference guide.

I’m using a “Reaction” with Control Surface Studio 2.8.1 and Ableton Live 11.1.41 and Phyton 3

It was quite a journey to find the exact way to get a sysex command running in the first place, as many examples were using a Phyton version prior to 3, where the implicit conversion from int-arrays to str-arrays were treated differently. So this is for Phyton 3 and Ableton live 11 only. I couldn’t test it with Ableton live 12.

You can attach the reaction to any of the LED’s or Knobs, while I’m using for the knob’s LEDs a different channel-ID, since it somehow interfered with unknown messages to turn some LED’s off, uninentionally.

Example for “LED device”

In your controller template, set the device button to Toggle / Off-On with normal velocity values (0, 127)

Create a reaction “Device button” moved.

Create 2 action blocks_

• one for turning the LED on (velocity value of 127), and
• another one for turning the LED off (velocity value of 0)

Condition for the action block is simply querying “Device button latest velocity value” == 0  (or == 127)

Action is “Script -> Custom -> Send RAW midi data”

at the custom-code field, enter

(0xF0, 0x00, 0x20, 0x29, 0x02, 0x11, 0x78, 0x06, 0x28, 0x3C, 0xF7), optimized = True

that turns the LED on

(0xF0, 0x00, 0x20, 0x29, 0x02, 0x11, 0x78, 0x06, 0x28, 0x00, 0xF7), optimized = True

that turns the LED off

If you react for a different button, replace the  0x28  with the proper value of that button/LED.

Attached you can find the Controler Template with separate LED’s and a script for the LED buttons solo, device, mute and record arm. I’m using Custom Mode 6 on the LaunchControl XL. But you need to reconfigure the CC values alltogether.