CC map by veedjee: Eight CC Dials With Preset Morphing
Hardware that speaks MIDI CC is easy to buy and awkward to automate. You can send CC from a Live clip envelope, but editing eight parameters that way means eight lanes of drawing and no way to see the whole state of the machine at once. CC map by veedjee takes the opposite approach: eight dials on a MIDI track, each assigned to a CC number, all automatable, with presets and morphing between them.
The device is listed as CC map8 and described as a bidirectional CC controller. Bidirectional matters. It is not just a one-way sender; it is built to sit between a control surface and a piece of hardware, with Live's automation in the middle.
How it's wired up
The setup is short and worth getting right, because almost every problem people have with CC devices is routing, not the device. veedjee's own instructions: put it on a MIDI track, arm the track, and set the MIDI input and output in Live's I/O section.
That last part is the step people skip. A MIDI Effect only passes MIDI downstream; for the CCs to reach a synth in the room, the track's MIDI To has to point at the right interface port and channel, and the track has to be armed or monitoring. Once that is done, each of the eight dials sends its assigned CC continuously.
Assigning the CC numbers can go two ways. There is a MIDI learn function — move the control on your hardware or controller and the device picks it up — or you can choose the CC from a menu by hand. Learn is faster when you have the gear in front of you. The menu is better when you are working from a manual and know that, say, filter cutoff lives on a specific number.
Presets and the morph dial
The preset section is where this stops being a generic CC utility. You save a state by shift-clicking a circle (maj+click, in veedjee's notes). Then you pick two presets and move the Morph dial to interpolate between them — all eight CCs sweeping together along one control.
There is also a Switch button that automates the morph, with an adjustable morphing time and a loop option. So the morph can be a hand gesture, an automated parameter, or a free-running cycle that keeps the hardware drifting between two states while you do something else.
That is the feature worth designing a session around. Eight simultaneous CC moves, correlated, from one dial, is not something Live gives you natively without a lot of mapping work.
Three sessions where it earns its place
A hardware synth with no patch memory. Plenty of desktop boxes and clones have no save slots. Put CC map on the track feeding the synth, learn its eight most useful CCs, and store your sounds as presets inside the device. Because the device lives in the Live set, the set recalls the sound. The morph dial then becomes a way to travel between two of your own patches during an arrangement rather than jumping hard between them.
Live performance transitions. Build preset A as the verse state of your external gear and preset B as the chorus state. Map the Morph dial to a fader on your controller and you have a single physical move that reshapes filter, resonance, envelope, and effect sends together. If you want it hands-free, set the morph time and hit Switch so the transition takes a fixed duration while you handle something else.
Slow drift on a pad or drone. Two presets that are only slightly different, loop morphing on, long morph time. The hardware never settles. This is the cheapest way to make an external synth sound alive under a sustained part, and it costs you one automation lane instead of eight.
Version 1.1 added something small but practical: dials 1–8 are set to be the first parameters for Push and APC40. That means when you select the device on hardware, the eight CC dials are what you get on the encoders, not a page of configuration controls. For anyone performing with Push, that ordering is the difference between the device being usable on stage and not.
What the numbers say
20,581 downloads and a 5/5 rating, with 16 comments. It was added in October 2014 and updated later that month. Built against Live 9.1.5 and Max 6.1.8.
Read that pairing carefully. A perfect rating on a device with twenty thousand downloads means the people who needed it got what they came for — and utility devices like this tend to attract users who know exactly what they want, so they are either satisfied or they move on without rating. The download count tells you it solved a common problem. The flat 5/5 tells you it solved it without surprises.
The age is the honest caveat. The last update is from 2014 and the stated requirements are Live 9 and Max 6. Max for Live devices of that vintage often keep working in current Live versions, but nobody has touched this one in a long time, so test it in your own set before you build a show around it. The licence is Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives, which means you can use it but not modify and redistribute it — relevant if you were hoping to patch in a ninth dial.
Where it sits among other MIDI effects
Browse the MIDI effect category at this popularity level and you find mostly generators and humanisers. CC map is in a different job family. The comparison is still useful, because it shows what you would reach for instead.
- Stepper by dric (19,591 downloads, 5/5) is the closest in spirit: a step sequencer crossed with an LFO that can automate any parameter in Live, with per-step waveforms, up to 16 steps, and controls for speed, step count, depth, and offset. Where CC map gives you eight static values you morph between, Stepper gives you one evolving shape per target. Use Stepper when you want rhythmic movement; use CC map when you want a state you can store and recall.
- Tombola Sequencer by joelpowell (20,377 downloads, 5/5) is a note generator modelled on the OP-1 tombola — you play notes in, up to 64, and they bounce around under speed, mass, gravity, and shape, all automatable. Notes, not CCs. It pairs with CC map rather than competing: tombola makes the part, CC map shapes the voice playing it.
- MotionMod by zealtv (20,901 downloads, 4/5) is a modulation source driven by camera motion detection. It is the only other device here aimed at generating control data from outside the computer, and it is the most experimental of the group — worth reading up on separately in the MotionMod deep dive. Note the 4/5 rating; it is less of a sure thing.
- Humanizer by humanize (19,991 downloads, 5/5) adds timing and feel variation. Its own page says it has been superseded by Group Humanizer, which handles multiple correlated channels. Different problem entirely, but it rounds out the picture of what this slice of the library is used for.
Who should skip it
If you have no external MIDI hardware, there is very little here for you. Live's own mapping already connects a controller to plugin parameters, and CC map's value is specifically in sending CC out to something that listens for it.
If you need more than eight parameters under one morph, you will be running multiple instances and keeping their presets in sync by hand — workable, but not elegant.
If you are on a very recent Live version and cannot tolerate a device that might need testing, factor in the 2014 update date. And if you want to modify the patch, the NoDerivatives licence closes that door.
Everyone else — anyone with a synth, drum machine, or effects box that responds to CC and no good way to recall or sweep its settings from Live — should treat this as a default. Learn the CCs, save two presets, map the morph dial. That is twenty minutes of setup for a control layer you keep using.