I found (in my opinion) the best solution for sample triggering using the Quad Cortex. I made a Reddit post about it on the NDSP subreddit a while back, but figured I’d share it here too so I can help anyone looking for a good sample triggering method.
So in my band, it’s recently become my job to trigger our samples like sub drops and stuff like that. We don’t use a laptop or run the show on rails, so samples must be triggered manually. Our drummer didn’t want to go the sample pad route, so I set out to look for pedal board based solutions to handle sample triggering.
I found a bunch of super hacky methods out there that I honestly wasn’t interesting in even trying. Such as loading samples onto a Boss RC-1 loop station and other similar methods.
I found this glorious little box by Oscillator devices called the Minerva. I couldn’t find any posts anywhere about anyone using it with their amp modeler, but if it’s designed to work with a MIDI controller then surely it would work with a Quad Cortex, right? Well indeed it does and it’s awesome.
You just load the samples onto the onboard SD card, MIDI out from the QC into the Minerva, send the audio out of the Minerva how you choose (I go into a DI box to convert it to a balanced signal), then map an unused button on the QC to send a specific MIDI value that correlates with whichever sample you want to trigger.
Here’s the link to the original Reddit post with video
Here are the steps to configure the Minerva and QC MIDI settings