I thought about this and I realised, that triggering with keyboard should work fine.
so.
It could be done this way:
RShoulder + down arrow on song screen should open this mapping screen for keyboard keys
you could change triggering key by doublepressing A button on nonempty chain
or (better) with directly tapping a keyboard key you'd like to use as trigger (in song play mode)

only keys mapped to normal piggy navigating buttons should't be selected here (it will work as expected - up, down, left, right, select, start, LShoulder, RShoulder ) depending on how this is mapped in config.xml (or default)

RShoulder + F1-F8 should work as mute / unmute channels 1-8

Trigger keys shoul work in live mode this way:
Trigger on nonplaying chain will work as START on nonplaying chain
Trigger + Trigger (hit twice) on nonplaying chain will work as START + START on nonplaying chain
RShoulder + Trigger will stop assigned chain (or RShoulder + Trigger + Trigger (twice))

So, what do you think about this?

Yea but then you need a per song config, so that means creating a new xml for the song.. or worst the ui additions that Marc was trying to avoid. I like escs idea for split channels, but maybe Marc can just copy the spec for the launchpad s, which seems the ideal target controller for something like this:

http://d19ulaff0trnck.cloudfront.net/si … -s-prm.pdf

So it seems to use the same midi notes for each ROW and saves a few midi notes as modifiers for the rows? so Toggling the down error has Midi note 0 start chain 1 on channel 1 at position 1, but everytime you toggle the up or down buttons on the launchpad it will skip up or down 16 rows? The biggest hassle with this is you need some sort of bidrectional communication with the launchpad to show what chain is playing, which fails the LOTS OF WORK FOR MARC component.

Shame, that I don’t have velocity sensitive anything....

you don’t have to play each chain directly.
just set row of few chains
01
02
03
04
--
so you can map your trigger to 01 and play whole 4 chains one by one, than piggy jumps back to  beginning of this row
or you can jump back to 01 by trigger
or map second trigger to 03 and jump to 01 or to 03

so, how many triggers do you need?
I think 12, 16, or 32 per song
If you would have more, you wouldn’t know, what you are doing.
So, I think it’s important to set each song mapping separately.

Different midi channels for each piggy channel maybe?

But - since there's only 128 notes on the midi scale - You'd only be able to cover 16 rows of 8 channels.

Maybe that's good enough though.

ideally chain trigger would just hard assign note numbers starting right from left based on row # and channel all the way down.maybe velocity can dictate if its is quick queue or immediate que

There really wouldnt be any ui elements for this. Add per channel hardcoded or xml assigned cc for each channel mute and solo and you have a pretty powerful setup!

In essence, it is not super complex - i.e. all the pieces are there - I would just like to minimize the ui as much as possible because that's what takes the most time and I don't really have a lot of it on my hands right now.

Absolutely true, but the only events that I currently know that can be mapped are:

/event/up
/event/down
/event/left
/event/right
/event/a
/event/b
/event/a
/event/b
/event/lshoulder
/event/rshoulder
/event/start
/tempo/tap

I would LOVE to see a ghetto build include direct chain/phrase jumps, though!

a direct note-> chain number solution would seem best rather than having to do all that, if possible

It may be that you can simply create a whole slew of macros that'll do what you need. Each macro would playback a series of MIDI CCs which would do the following:

RIGHT * X    -Move steps x right
DOWN * Y    -Move steps y down
LT+START    -Trigger chain
RT+START    -This is optional, but will mean that a chain plays only once through when triggered.
LEFT * X    -Move steps x left
RIGHT * Y    -Move steps y up

The x and y values of each macro would correspond to the location of a chain on the screen and assuming your controller/DAW/LGPT can trigger those commands fast enough, that'll do exactly what you intent.

I'm not sure if all controllers can save macros like that, but I'm sure you could at least test a setup like this via a DAW (MIDI controller > DAW with macros saved as MIDI > LGPT with midi values mapped to input events).

Exactly
that's what I mean
and you can compose music on your handheld, than play it from netbook

that sounds like an awesome way to use it, almost turning piggy into a super low budget mpc

Check out my live track
Saxophone and Kaossilator (organ like melodies in the beginning and the end)
All other sounds are from Piggy
I think 12 pads are enough for one track
http://chipmusic.org/ryba/music/rybachyba02cut

I have yamaha SU10
12 pads, 4 banks
I want to play same,as i play piggy live
I just mute / unmute different channels or turn on / off different chains
I make song in piggy and play it live
the only difference is, that now it takes too much time to scroll cursor between chains to trigger them
i want to be faster
clear?

Always interested to hear people's setup. How would you control things from a small controller ? Gimme details