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Has anyone been able to successfully trigger one of the sample bank pads on the KP3 via USB MIDI? In other words, run a sequencing program on your laptop (I've tried both Renoise and Ableton), use that program as the MIDI clock master and the KP3 as the slave, and periodically send a Note On message via USB MIDI to trigger Sample Bank A?

I'm sorry if this question has been asked before. I searched the forum but only found somewhat similar applications. This seems like a really easy thing to do but I havent been able to do it yet.

For background, I want to use the KP3 as a glorified metronome. In Sample Bank A I have a sample loop of one measure of a click track at 110 bpm. I want to trigger it via MIDI at the start of every measure. I have a channel in the laptop's sequencer dedicated to sending the note C2 (with velocity 100) to the KP3 at the start of each measure, as that is the factory default for sending a Note On message to Sample Bank A. So far no dice.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Use Ableton as your metronome. Or use a metronome as a metronome. The KP3 isn't a glorified metronome. I don't buy your reasons. Ableton can playback samples without any assistance by the KP3, so what you're trying to do seems pointless and unnecessarily convoluted. You can buy 10 metronomes for the price of the KP3. Besides, you don't need Ableton or midi sync to turn the KP3 into a metronome. Just sample 1 beat and say 'click' into the mic, then use the BPM knob.

I'm glad you said what I felt like saying but didn't.

Lol, you seem pretty offended. Sorry to get you so upset.

In any case, no it's not pointless. I'm already using the Kaoss for fx purposes on other songs during live performance, but need an outboard metronome for a song where I'm doing playback from the computer while playing guitar. I have a two channel audio interface (Apogee Duet) so having Ableton play a click track is not acceptable, unless I want the audience to hear it too (I don't).

So I need an outboard metronome that I do not need to set or mess around with at all. In other words I just want to hit play in Ableton and for the metronome to start clicking away lockstep in sync with Ableton into my headphones. If you can think of another way to achieve this, please let me know. But again, I really just want to know how to trigger the sample bank via USB.

So there's the justification for my usage, not that I should really need to provide one. Regardless of people's reasons for using gear in a certain way, it would be more beneficial to everyone to just answer the question asked, and then provide any possible suggestions for a better implementation.

to answer the original question, i have done this and it is very easy.
read the respective manuals for ableton and the kp3 and make sure you're sending the right messages and it should be fairly simple.

it sounds like you probably have some setting wrong in ableton or renoise or something simple like that.

I wasn't offended or angry whatsoever. Just because I pointed out something that seems overly complex or convoluted doesn't mean that I'm mad at whoever suggested it. Since you have a Duet, then that should leave the built-in audio output on the computer free for metronome duties. Since Ableton has metronome capability built-in, can you see how using what it already does is much simpler than what you propose? That was my only point.

As far as triggering the sample banks with midi, see page 21 of the owners manual. Have you sent note #36-#39 to the KP3? You need to have the KP3 and Ableton set to the same midi channel, of course. So in decimal, you need to send a midi command of 144, 36, 127, which is a channel 1 note on for note 36 with a velocity of 127. You'll need to be sure that the sample loaded on the pad is ready to go and has no leading dead time, or the audio you hear will trail the midi note by that dead time. Use the KP3 editor to look at the sample waveform to ensure that the audio starts precisely at the beginning of the beat.