OVERVIEW

This pedalboard lets me do almost everything I'd ever wanted to do with my feet. It is definitely intended to be used with ART effects units (I use it with my ART SGX Nightbass SE, and it works wonderfully), but it is programmable enough to use with any setup that understands Discrete and Continuous MIDI Controllers and Program Change commands.

PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION

The pedalboard is sturdily made of heavy-gauge black-painted steel. It is supposed to come with six little rubber feet that you can affix to the bottom to avoid scarring surfaces, but there weren't any little rubber feet with mine. If they don't happen to come with yours either, you'll need to be careful, because there are protruding screw heads on the bottom that can cause trouble unless you play on carpet.

On top, at the left end, there are two continuous pedals which drive optical encoders. (As you press a pedal, it feeds a transparent plastic strip with black stripes into a pair of LED/detector sets.) In my opinion, this is much better than a potentiometer-based design (even one that never gets scratchy) or the optical design used by the Digitech Whammy Pedal, in which a constant- brightness LED nods closer to and farther away from a photodetector as the pedal is moved, because the data is digital from the very beginning and does not have to be converted from analog.

There are also fourteen rubber domes in two rows of seven, about an inch and a half in diameter, that are just stiff enough and spaced at just the right distance to be easy to hit on purpose and hard to hit accidentally. Twelve of the domes have accompanying high-brightness jumbo LEDs next to them.

At top center is a three-digit LED numeric display that usually shows either the last Program Change that was sent, or the last one that was received.

USER-INTERFACE ARCHITECTURE

The two pedals come preprogrammed to send MIDI Continuous Controller data for Controllers 4 (left pedal) and 11 (right pedal), but can be reprogrammed to send data for any controller. They have a sandpapery surface and a throw of, oh, maybe 15 degrees. Each pedal has a pair of boltheads at its pivot point that you can tighten if it gets too loose and floppy; you are elaborately cautioned not to overtighten. If the pedals send Controller messages too thick and fast for your controlled device to decipher, you can program them to send change messages less often.

The dome buttons are divided into two groups: the leftmost four are what might be called "mode buttons" while the rightmost ten are "data buttons."

The four mode buttons include Up and Down buttons, a Bypass button, and a Mode button.

The one I use most often is the Mode button. Pressing it toggles the data buttons between two modes: in one they send Program Change messages, and in the other they send Discrete Controller messages. There's an LED beside the Mode button that's off in Program Change mode and on in Discrete Controller mode.

The Mode button also affects the operation of the Up and Down buttons. In Program Change mode, the Up and Down buttons control which set of ten Program Change messages the data buttons send (but don't send any messages of their own). For example, if the data buttons are set up to send Program Changes 51-60, then a press of the Up button will prepare them to send Program Changes 61-70. Conversely, a press of the Down button will prepare them to send Program Changes 41-50. Repeated presses of the direction buttons "wrap around" from high to low and vice versa. In Discrete Controller mode, the Up button sends a Program Change message numbered one higher than the last one the pedalboard sent, and the Down button sends a message numbered one lower. In this way, you can step through Programs even when your data buttons are busy sending Discrete Controller messages.

The Bypass button comes programmed to send MIDI Controller 84, which is recognized by some manufacturers (including ART, of course) to mean Bypass. However, it can alternatively be programmed to toggle the 1/4" Bypass Out jack on the back of the Ultrafoot between shorted and open states, if you have a unit that understands a passive footswitch but not MIDI Controller 84. You can program the Bypass Out jack to be normally open or normally closed. When the pedalboard thinks that whatever's connected to it is in Bypass mode, the LED beside the Bypass button comes on.

The data buttons are numbered from 1 to 10. They are also labeled with legends that correspond to what ART units are programmed to understand that they mean when they're in Controller mode.

When in Controller mode, they inflexibly send Discrete Controller 70-79 messages; they cannot be programmed to send any others. Each has an LED beside it. When the button sends a Controller message, the state of the LED is toggled by the Ultrafoot. If the controlled unit is not speaking to the Ultrafoot, that's where it ends. On the other hand, if there is an active MIDI line plugged into the Ultrafoot's MIDI IN, the Ultrafoot waits for a fraction of a second to see if the Controller message will be echoed to it. If it is, fine. If it is not, the state of the LED is toggled back. So, in such a case, if you try to turn On a Controller that the controlled device doesn't want turned on, the LED will flash on and then off quickly.

When in Program Change mode, they send the Program Change message associated with them according to the particular range of Program Changes that has been selected by the Up and Down buttons. For example, if the current range is 51-60, then button 1 sends Program Change 51, button 10 sends Program Change 60, and button 7 sends Program Change 57. When a Program Change message is sent, the three-digit display changes to reflect it.

The Ultrafoot understands and speaks the MMA/JMSC bank-select protocol. This means that, to units that also understand the bank-select protocol, the Ultrafoot can specify up to 255 different Programs. It can also handle ranges of 128 and 200. It comes out of the box set up to send Program Changes from 1 to 200.

PICKS

Just like the SGX Nightbass, the X-15 Ultrafoot comes with no power switch. Plug the wall wart into the wall, and it's on. I've decided that I like this, because I run all my stuff through a power-distribution module, and if there were a power switch it'd be on all the time anyway--so ART saved me money on something I wouldn't use anyway.

As I've already mentioned, I like the design of the continuous pedals. Digital optical encoders just mean one less level of conversion, which means less lag and more predictable hysteresis.

The unit is just about the same size as a mini keyboard, so you can put it in a keyboard case for carrying around.

I like the back-channel concept, where the controlled device talks back to the Ultrafoot for confirmation.

The Ultrafoot can be set up to talk on three MIDI channels at once: one for the left pedal, one for the right pedal, and the third for the rest of the unit. Neat.

I haven't used it yet, but the 1/4" passive Bypass Out jack has got to have lots of potential--perhaps for amplifier channel selection or EQ enable/disable.

PANS

The X-15 Ultrafoot is an amazing piece of equipment, but nothing is perfect. Here are a few peeves I have about the Ultrafoot.

They didn't give me any little rubber feet! I wonder how many other people didn't get them.

In general, it's programmable, but not programmable enough. You can't change the controller numbers sent by the Bypass button or the data buttons. Bummer. You can't make some of the data buttons (or maybe the Bypass button) send on a different MIDI channel. It would be good to be able to give up a few buttons controlling my effect unit, and instead have them control a sequencer, for example. This would probably be especially frustrating for someone who had an effects box that didn't understand all ten controllers.

The Ultrafoot shows me what wonderful things real-time continuous control can do, and then limits me to only two channels of it. I can see that putting two or four more pedals on the unit might be prohibitive; but there are other ways to accomplish it. ART could have come up with an assignment scheme that would let you use a larger number of Continuous Controllers while being restricted to only two at a time. Alternatively, they could have provided a few CV input jacks and let you hook up your own expression pedals; you wouldn't get the neat optical encoding this way, and they'd have to charge you extra for the A/D converter (they could probably get by with just one, by scanning it at high speed over the CV pedals), but it'd be worth it to me.

I could handle a somewhat longer throw on the pedals. With only 15 degrees or so, it can be hard to be subtle if you've got a pedal hooked up to what I call a sore-thumb parameter.

The pedals come pre-calibrated and hard-wired. It's too bad. One of my pedals has drifted so that I can't get a 0 value out of it unless I really stomp it hard; if I just run it back to the stop, it sends a 1 or 2. This makes it impossible to use this pedal for a parameter that must be 0 most of the time, but is occasionally run up to higher values for effect. It would be nice to have a less rigid correspondence between optical-encoder stripes and Controller values, so that you could select an option in Setup, waggle the pedals through their full range, and have them be recalibrated.

Construction	90%
Playability	90%
Sound	0%
Value	95%
Cust. Service	0%
Overall	92%