Patch change in Novation Peak from Ableton Live


Novation Peak on my self-built stand

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I recently got a Novation Peak and as I already played with Ableton Live before, it was no question to link the two immediately. As I do not yet have a midi keyboard, I use MIDI tracks in Live to play the Peak. MIDI clips also offer to tell the receiver what program / bank should be used - but for some reason I could not get it to work with the Peak.

Ableton only gives some standard instructions and I could not find any Peak-related information for my problem. Live itself only says that configuration may vary. So I figured it out by try and error and here is how it works:

Create and select a MIDI clip. Find the "program change" section. Set it as follows:

  • The "Bank" setting is ignored by the Peak
  • "Sub" changes the bank in Peak, but it has an offset of 1, so for A the value is 2, for B it is 3 and so on.
  • "Pgm" changes the patch in the bank. It is a 1:1 relation but Live starts with 1 while Peak starts with 000 so to select patch 000 enter 1, for patch 001 enter 2 and so on.

Ableton Live

Click the images to enlarge them. If you did everything right, the Peak will now select the configured patch whenever you launch a clip.

There is quite a lot of discussion if the midi connection settings are relevant. They are not. The Peak needs to receive Midi but if it does not, nothing else will work either. Apart from that, all settings are optional, hence deactivated in the screenshot. You can activate them though, changing the patch will work anyway.

Ableton Live Midi Settings Dialogue

These settings were tested with Ableton Live Lite 10 on a Windows 8.1 machine.