Buttons to Effects

Hey everyone!

I am a new member, long-time lurker, and longer-time fan of the site (and a huge fan of everything that comes out of here). I have a question that I've tried googling both the internet and searching the community s, but haven't gotten any luck with an answer, so if it's something obvious I missed, I'm sorry!

First off, I started DJing a few weeks (a month?) ago after having an interest but no funds for about 8 years. I talked to a DJ at a club I went to and bugged him about his gear, and he was very cool and basically inspired me to start DJing (resale value, how long controllers tend to last, etc). So a few days later I bought a Numark Mixtrack with an Audio 2 DJ, spent $30 on Beatport, and loaded up my other collection of songs and started mixing. Well, because I'm irresponsible and NI has that crazy sale goin on, I bought Traktor Pro full and have been constantly hacking away on it. For Christmas, I begged my family to buy me Traktor Scratch Pro, and then I'm getting myself some tables and a nice 4-channel mixer.

What I'm interested in is using my MIDI keyboard to control various things during my live performances (yes, I played 3 hours at a friend's house, got complemented very nicely and made $1 for my performance in terms of a fee not a tip, so technically, I am a professional DJ already ). I have my keyboard (Axiom 25, 1st Gen) set to do various things like 8 cue points on the pads (shift key toggles between A(default) and B), and I have it mapped to beatjump (4 or 8 left or right, depending on shift again) and setting fixed-length loops and such.

Now, the gist of this thread, I have a few questions (and a problem with brevity), I experimented and neglected my family for about 4 hours last evening , but I couldn't figure out how to do a loop roll (loop while note/button is held down), the button option for setting and activating a loop only allows a trigger of activate or deactivate the loop. What's a good way to do this? Am I completely missing something obvious here? I honestly feel like I am.

My next question concerns the effects mappings like on the Traktor dicer mappings. First off, should the TSI viewer linked be able to show me the parameters for that? I get an issue saying it's neither a keyboard, nor MIDI mapping, which I'm sure is wrong (because it's definitely a MIDI device), but I can't view any non-qwerty-keyboard mappings with it. Anyway, what I want to do is have a key load a certain effect with a certain parameter (or set of) that's on as long as the note is held down, so something like beatmasher or LFO-based effects like in the demo video immediately come to mind. Something so I could chain effects without having to twiddle knobs and push too many buttons on the other side of my setup. (pressing two or three keys instead of three seeks, setting parameters from memory, then activating individually).

One thing I did that, I thought, was worth knowing, is getting the axiom 25s pots to be rotary encoders, and assigning them more natural numbers and what not. This allows me to increment or decrement an effect by turning a knob, rather than finding where it was first, then going to where I want it to go. It was a bit tricky, because their documentation is awkward unless you're really familiar with MIDI already (I am, I hack a lot with hardware as a Computer Engineer, so that's good) I can share my layout and everything when I get it done how I like it, if anybody's interested.

Again, if this is stupid, easy, and easily found or something just let me know. I'm by no means just screaming into the tubes hoping for someone to do the work for me (without any previous effort that is )

Thanks!