Laying Out Controllers on a Keystation III

Now the middle row if the group B controllers is where I usually put pitch and LFO related controllers.



GROUP B Second Row

All controllers set to Global Channel 0

B18 CC129 Coarse Tune

B19 CC130 Fine Tune

B20 CC128 MSB 0 LSB 0 Pitch Bend Sensitivity 0-24 semitones. Default value 2 Min val. 0. Max val. 24.

B21 CC141 MSB 0 LSB 2 Master Coarse Tuning +/- 24 Semitones Min. val 24. Max val. 84

B22 Master Fine MSB 0 LSB 1

B23 CC16 System Controller 1

B24 CC17 System Controller 2

B25 CC131 Channel Aftertouch



The three rotaries B23 - B24 cover the two system controllers and aftertouch. These are used as modulation sources along with the pitch and mod wheels, and polyphonic aftertouch. The modulation matrix however, can only be activated and edited by sysex, which is beyond the keystation. A future project for the BCR2000 me thinks. But I'll park them here till I get around to them.

Third Row

All controllers set to global channel 0
B10 CC5 Portomento Speed
B11 CC84 Portomento Control

B12 CC1 Modulation

B13 CC7 Volume

B14 CC11 Expression

B15 CC10 Pan

B16 CC91 Reverb Send

B17 CC93 Chorus Send



I like generally to place portomento, panning and effects controllers on the bottom row of group B.
The modulation, pitch and expression controllers are here only, because they are the most useful controllers out of whats left. I will need to do some more experimentation, to see if there is a more useful function for these. Prehaps a set of the vibrato controllers with the values limited to +2/-2 in value to try and introduce some "analogue wobble" to synth type waves. Although, the PMA's sine wave only LFO's may limit this.

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.

Laying Out Midi Controllers on a Keystation Pro

With all those buttons and knobs- 55, the Keystation initially seems to be capable of simulataneously controlling every parameter possible. However even a fairly basic unit like a PMA5 will use them all up fairly quickly.

A useful feature of M-Audios design is the three controller groups- A, B and C. Each group represents a different type of controller on the Keystation.

Group A comprises mod and pitch wheels, the five buttons above them and three pedals. These controllers are probably best allocated to live proformance controllers such as sustain, and transport duties for controlling modules and software. One feature of this group is that they can be allocated individually to each of the four layers, and can even have differing controllers for each layer. I have'nt grasped yet what to do with that feature, but its on the list.

So I'll start by allocating these controllers to group A



The Two Wheels

Pitch Bend - CC140 (special keystation CC number

Modulation- CC1

The Five Buttons

(left to right)

Mono/Poly- CC126 Mono on toggling to CC127 Poly on

Portomento On/Off- CC65

Soft- CC67 I have'nt noticed any great effect from this as yet.

Sostenuto- CC66 Not quite sure what this does, something about sustaining only the notes active at the time its engaged, rather than all incoming notes, which is sustain

Sustain- CC65 I'm not great with pedals, so here's a useful position to put this.