Novation Launchpad, purchased new by the donor in 2011 (in its original case), and in very good condition. The donor is a musician and composer based in Leeds (http://chrissieviolin.info/ ) and has provided notes on her reasons for buying the Launchpad, how she used it, and why she no longer does (see below).

Notes from the donor:

“I bought the Novation Launchpad (v1, but it wasn’t called that then, it was just “The

Launchpad")in May 2011 for use with Ableton Live 8 (I think).

I bought it to get more to grips with the Ableton Live clip-based workflow, but it never really gelled for me - though I did once use it as a looper while playing violin (not ideal really, as it’s finger-operated rather than foot-operated and violin is quite finger-intensive anyway!) at the Sonic Arts conference. What the device spent a lot of its time doing was being a scene launcher for a band I was in called Catscans:

Catscans had the usual turnover of musicians, and when we lost a really good bass player (moved down to London), Jonny, who wrote all the songs, decided to use a programmed, synthesized bass-line instead. Only we had no-one to play it as we were all busy with our own instruments - so we programmed the bass lines for whole songs into Ableton - on separate tracks so we could mix them - and then launched the whole scene using the launchpad. We had one scene per song, consisting of 2 or 3 bass track and a click for the lead guitar and drums to play to. You can see the laptop, M-Audio soundcard and launchpad to the left of me on the two gig photos.

To be honest it wasn’t ideal and the band split up after a couple of years as the drummer didn’t like playing to click (amongst other things) and the launchpad and Ableton didn’t get used much after that. When Ableton released Live 10 I didn’t bother to upgrade and Live 9 ceased working on my laptop but I didn’t really miss it as I was doing all my recording into Reaper.

I did use the launchpad a couple of times for CSMA gigs. I have software I wrote for a Raspberry Pi that I use for those gigs that does the, fairly involved, MIDI routing and preset selection and I used the launchpad for MIDI channel selection for my controller keyboard, and selecting the batch of presets for each synth needed for each piece we played, but that didn’t last long as I went to using the Yamaha Montage as a main instrument & controller and it could do all of those things from the same device - with a little extra coding on the Pi.

So the launchpad has been lounging in my store room for a while now. I plugged it into my recent i9 laptop when I tried Bitwig earlier this year but it wasn’t even recognised as a valid MIDI device any more so I decided it was life-expired.”