Chase Bliss, beautifully controlled
Check out our Chase Bliss showcase — first in a new series spotlighting pedal and synth makers.
If you own a Chase Bliss pedal, you already know the deal: tiny enclosure, dip switches on the back, deep MIDI under the hood, and a whole world of behavior that the front panel can only hint at. The pedals are gorgeous. Driving them from the pedal alone is not.
So I built a page for it: mididesigner.com/chase-bliss
It’s a single home for the best community-made Chase Bliss layouts for MIDI Designer Pro X — Mood MKII, Reverse Mode C, Thermae, Onward, Blooper, Warped Vinyl Hi-Fi, Gen Loss MkII, Dark World, plus a couple of “command center” layouts that drive multiple pedals from one surface. Eleven layouts in total, with about 5,700 downloads between them so far.
And before I go any further: this is the first of many. More maker pages are coming — other pedal builders, synth manufacturers, hardware ecosystems. Chase Bliss is the kickoff.
Why a dedicated page
The Chase Bliss world is one of the strongest pockets of the MIDI Designer community. Players have been quietly building beautiful, deeply-considered layouts for these pedals for years, and the work deserved better than being scattered across Q&A threads where you had to know what you were looking for.
The new page rounds up the highlights — featured layouts, screenshots, and links to the full thing on the Q&A site. Find your pedal, grab the layout, and you’re controlling it from your iPad — or iPhone, or Mac — five minutes later.
(Yeah, Mac. MIDI Designer Pro X runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs and on iPhone, not just iPad. Same layouts, same app, same MIDI. Use whatever screen you’ve got at hand.)
Yasir!
I need to stop and talk about yasir for a minute, because nine of the eleven layouts on this page are his.
Nine.
If you’re a Chase Bliss player who has touched MIDI Designer at any point in the last few years, you’ve almost certainly used something yasir made. Mood MKII, Mood MK ONE, Reverse Mode C, Onward, Blooper, Warped Vinyl Hi-Fi, the Command Centre layouts — that’s all him. The Platinum-rated Reverse Mode C layout, the Gold-rated Mood MKII with its 1,800+ downloads, the multi-pedal Command Centre that lets you move across MOOD, Reverse Mode C, and Warped Vinyl from one surface — yasir.
These aren’t quick-and-dirty configurations — they’re complete workflows. Yasir ships starter preset banks with the Mood MKII, Reverse Mode C, Onward, and Blooper layouts. He builds save-to-pedal flows so you can get sounds onto the hardware, not just control it live. He pulls reference pages from the manuals into the layouts themselves. He keeps them current — the Warped Vinyl Hi-Fi layout has the March clock-follow fix already folded in. And the Command Centre layouts span four pedals from a single surface, which is the kind of thinking you only get from someone who’s actually playing the rig.
A huge thank you to yasir. The Chase Bliss page exists in the form it does because of his work. Note: he’s also got a page of his own.
Also on the page: mitchelldr's Thermae editor, which makes the pedal's sequenced timeshifter make sense at a glance — exactly the kind of clarity Thermae deserves. And h8xlolo's Gen Loss MkII and Dark World layouts, taking on two of Chase Bliss's trickiest pedals and giving them surfaces that actually fit how you'd want to play them. The layouts on this page exist because of the Community contributors who built them, and we're grateful for every one.
How to actually use this stuff
Three steps:
Get the app. MIDI Designer Pro X from the App Store — works on iPad, iPhone, and Mac.
Connect. Apple device → USB MIDI interface → Chase Bliss MIDIbox → pedal. Since it’s just MIDI, there are many wireless options, too (QA Entry).
Load the layout and start playing.
That’s it. The layout authors have done the hard work. You’re walking into a finished room.
More maker pages coming
The Chase Bliss page is one of seventy-seven manufacturer ecosystems represented in the MIDI Designer community. Three hundred and sixty-six layouts in total, and some of those ecosystems are deep — Roland alone has fifty-two layouts, Yamaha twenty-nine, Korg eighteen. On the pedal side, Meris is right behind Chase Bliss with thirteen, and there’s strong work for Strymon, Empress, Source Audio, Eventide, Hologram, and Walrus Audio sitting there too.
Each of those deserves the same treatment: a clean front door, the makers credited, the screenshots, the descriptions, the download counts. New players landing cold and being up and running fast.
If there’s a manufacturer you’d love to see get this treatment, I’d be glad to hear about it — reply anytime. More pages are on the way. For now, if you’re a Chase Bliss player who hasn’t tried driving your pedals from an iPad, iPhone, or Mac yet, this is the easiest entry point I can give you.
→ mididesigner.com/chase-bliss
— Dan, JK and the MIDI Designer Team
MIDI Designer :: dream | create | play