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We’ve gotten quite a few requests lately about a Control Script that integrates the K-Mix with Ableton Live. Don’t worry, it’s on its way! In the meantime, you can still get some dynamic hands-on control using an often overlooked text document. Using the UserConfiguration.txt file, we can quickly provide a way to play with devices and control the faders in Ableton Live right from our K-Mix with zero MIDI mapping. This lacks some of the more advanced features of a full blown Remote Script. We won’t have LED feedback, and we won’t be able to have different banks or pages on one preset, but we’ll still be able to get some decent integration. There is no programming background needed and Ableton provides everything you need to get this set up in a matter of minutes. This article serves more to simply point you in the right direction.

First you’ll want to find Live’s Preferences folder, which is where all our user configurations are held. That directory can be found here on Mac:

/Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/Ableton/ Live x.x.x

And here on Windows:

\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Ableton\Live x.x.x\Preferences\

You also may need to expose hidden folders. Here is an article from Ableton explaining how to do that: https://www.ableton.com/en/help/article/access-hidden-folders/

Once you find the folder, you should see a few different files. The one we are looking for is named the ‘User Remote Scripts’ folder. Open that up and you should find two text files inside. Let’s start by opening the InstantMappings-HowTo.txt file, for a brief overview. We are instructed to create a new folder, so let’s make a K_Mix_User folder and copy the UserConfiguration.txt file into our newly created folder. Now all that’s left is to edit some numbers and we’ll be good to go.

The UserConfiguration.txt has all the information you’ll need, so pop that open and take a look. There are sections for controlling devices, controlling track volume, master volume and send level. I’ve put together a UserConfiguration.txt that will work with the default K-Mix preset, so feel free to use that, but if you want to customize it yourself it’s really straightforward.

Some things to keep in mind: The K-Mix buttons only send notes, so we can’t use the UserConfiguration.txt to arm tracks, control the transport, or move parameter banks. MIDI bank 1 on the K-Mix sends on channel 1, the faders are device controls, the rotaries control the Send A levels for tracks 1 through 4, and the master fader controls the master volume of Live. If you switch to MIDI bank 2, the faders will control the volume of the first 8 tracks.

Have fun controlling Live!