Laying Out Group Controllers on a Keystation II

Group B Controllers

Righto, now onward to group B; 24 rotary knobs, and 8 buttons. This is where the main sound shaping will take place.

Being able to load the whole 32 controllers in from one of the 10 presets stored in the Keystation opens up a possibile workflow. By creating several presets for different tasks and loading group B encoders for each step, I should be able to push the PMA5 to its limits.

The three preset banks that occur to me are;

Voice editing

Drum Voice Editing

Mixing when used with an external sequencer



GROUP B Bank 1 VOICE EDITING

Upper Row of Rotary Controllers (left to right)

All controllers set to global channel 0

B26 Filter Cutoff

B27 Filter Resonance

B28 Vibrato Delay
B29 Attack (filter & amp)

B30 Decay (filter & amp)

B31 Release (filter & amp)

B32 Vibrato Depth

B33 Vibrato Rate

The eight rotary knobs along the top row are the easiest to find and manipulate, for my fingers. So this is where I tend to put the most useful controllers- usually filters to the left and envelopes to the right.

First up, the filter controls; cutoff, resonance and vibrato delay. While only having one filter type is a bummer, at least Roland included resonance, which was more than some manufacterers were doing in the early nineties, which is when the Sound Canvas range was spawned.

The Vibrato delay deserves special mention. On the face of it I would expect vibrato delay to delay the onset of pitch vibrato, specified by the vibrato depth and rate controllers. Well it low settings it might, but its main effect seems to be on thev filter. If I had to rename it, I would label it "filter chorus". It gives a fairly sparse filter section a valueble boost.

Following that is the attack, decay and release controllers for the filter and amplifier envelope. That these share a single envelope , is probably the biggest limitation of this synth engine.

On the right I'll park the two remaining vibrato controllers- rate and depth. However nothing can wreck a cool solo line faster than yanking a lfo controller by mistake. These two are probationary.