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.