Bulding a Reason devices MIDI-Controller

Want to talk about music hardware or software that doesn't include Reason?
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amcjen
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10 Sep 2018

I think this would be great, I’m all about the hardware controllers.

polysix
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11 Sep 2018

I build a dedicated Midi Controller for Basimilus & Manias (not on picture) based on teensy 3.2. 90 % of controller elements of the rack extensions are able. I´m with you ! If i foind more time we can start a talk about dedicated Midi Controller :puf_smile:

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Grüße aus Brandenburg

Greats from Brandenburg

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theshoemaker
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12 Sep 2018

I could provide a python based controller implementation with a generic remote codec. where you would just have to create. the controller with fast prototyping cycles. based on my scripting environment. Have a look here
:PUF_figure: latest :reason: V12 on MacOS Ventura

polysix
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14 Sep 2018

Unfortunately, I'm wrong for your project. I am much too unprofessional and started to work on it in March with homemade controller :puf_smile:
To build a subtractor is my view a bigger project. And if you ask me I would not be dependent on a software company. What are you doing when Reason has presented such an instrument? I already had this boulder on my controllers for Noise Engeneering but they are small with few functions. Then there is also the question how will your controller be usable afterwards? Potis, Encoder ? Motorized? And what is the price at the end?

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Faastwalker
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12 Nov 2018

Edin_16 wrote:
11 Nov 2018
Hi all

I continued the concept of the controller, you will now see the Version 4th Concept changes. I decited to kick out the motorized faders and the deep menu, replaced it with endless rotating knobs (without displays), becaus AMP, MOD and FILTER Envelopes will be most of the time assigned automatically there. Neverless you will see the actual value in the red LEDs around the knob and in the main display in the left top corner, when you touch the knobs. I added 2 "Push buttons", they are only active when you push them and become inactive when you stop pushing them. I tried to put as much as possible in it, in the other picture you see a 100% scale print in comparison to the Arturia Beatstep Pro. The size of the kontrolleur is 35cm (length) x 15cm (width)

What do you think, any wishes or did I forgot something? please give some feedback about the controller.

Cheers
This is looking awesome as a concept. I've come to a similar place with my idea for an ideal Reason / soft synth controller. But it's great what you have down to flesh out & illustrate your ideas here. My ideas have just been in my head! But I also thought of a knob heavy controller with endless rotary encoders. The problem with that is identifying what encoder is controlling what with having a large number of physical controls. The only real solution is visual feedback, which your concept has. You also need to see what value each encoder is mapped to. Your concept also takes this into account. Looking very, very good so far. I would love to see something like this in production. Would be perfect for Reason but beyond that any MIDI controllable software.

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Faastwalker
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14 Nov 2018

Edin_16 wrote:
13 Nov 2018
How I should go on, I mean, now the concept is clear. Should I model a 3D visualisation? Where I can find people for building a prototype or collaborate? Where I get the technical feedback, for example the exact sizes of the displays, the style of the knobs and the shops. How shall I or we (if somebody is interested) go on?
Good questions. This is the part I stumble at unfortunately. I'm stuck between an idea & a Kickstarter campaign! Building a full working prototype in the middle is the hard part. I really wouldn't know where to begin. I have a friend who is building a custom MIDI controller for his DJ'ing. But it's going to be a bespoke device centred around an Arduino. So I don't think practical for something that you may want to put into production. He's pretty good with this stuff I believe. I'm always trying to hit him up to get bits of information. But I'm still trying to fill in a lot of blanks before I can do anything else. I'll keep going though ;)

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artotaku
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15 Nov 2018

Edin_16 wrote:
13 Nov 2018
Thanks for feedback, I appreciate that! I think there are a coule of fixes but the concept has now a clear position and a solid conceptional fundament.
How I should go on, I mean, now the concept is clear. Should I model a 3D visualisation? Where I can find people for building a prototype or collaborate? Where I get the technical feedback, for example the exact sizes of the displays, the style of the knobs and the shops. How shall I or we (if somebody is interested) go on?

Greets from Leipzig.
If you don´t want go into the technical stuff building the prototype or there are no people around here who can build one you could also ask e. g. (since you are living in Germany) faderfox.de to build a custom midi controller. Have a look at their web page.
It will be very expensive, though. Expect it goes into a few thousands of Euro. But maybe this could be funded by the Reason community?

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Faastwalker
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18 Nov 2018

There was a kickstarter a while back for bespoke, high quality MIDI controllers. You sent your requirements & the company would build the controller. Fantastic idea. But unfortunately the prices would have been very high because of the high quality of the device. The Kickstarter never reached its goal. I think they would have achieved their funding goal if the end product would have been more affordable. But if something like your design was available I'd go with this in a heartbeat. There's plenty of controls, good feedback on currently assigned parameter value & destination. It's got everything you need in a nice sized, desktop controller. Spot on :thumbs_up:

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electrofux
Posts: 863
Joined: 21 Jan 2015

20 Nov 2018

I have composed myself a kindof universal controller for my Reason setup a couple of times now and i settled in the end for a setup that i find nearly optimal.
I have a Launchpad Mini which provides me all the buttons that i need with some color feedback, a Doepfer Pocket Dial which provides for the needed 16 encoders and an Ipad which is basically the Display of the setup.
As a device controller, the Lauchnpads displays 2 times 16 banks for the upper and lower 8 encoders on the Doepfer and an additional 8 push buttons for the selected device ( and a means to quickly compose a user bank of 16 controls).
I can quickly setup the controller to eg make the Doepfer to control the Filter bank with the upper and controls and whatever other bank i want to control with the lower 8 controllers. So that i dont run intor a situation where i cannot control 2 controls that i want to reach at the same time.
I found that buttons are the most important thing when it comes to making a controller work for different Reason devices. For example most controllers provide 8 bank buttons or a next/previous bank. But you need more banks 16 at least. Take Europa, it has a ton of controls for each Oscillator or REspire.
Also i wanted my controller to not only serve as a selected device controller but also being able to lock it to further devices like the Mixer and its 8 send effects. Therefore another set of buttons where needed to make the codec switches.
I also had a Behringer and while it has nice encoders it had too many to provide overview in every situation and that is mostly because of the lacking color coding. Color coding helps alot and can save some LCDs or is even quicker when it comes to figuring out what is being displayed to you- i wish Novation had a rgb launchpad mini version.

Now in an ideal world this would all come together in one device 80 buttons 16 controls and a shitload of displays but i have given up on that and stick with what i got- it has everything i need just not in the best places (Ipad as Display is not ideal).

If you want to stick to a more dedicated layout (eg having dedicated oscillator controls or Envelope controls) i would suggest having one section each with enough controls to accomodate most devices in Reason and provide buttons to switch between the number of eg Oscillators a device has. For example you provide 4 controls for the envelopes but the devices in Reason have more controls. Subtractor has 4 for the Amp, 6 for the Filter and 7 for the Mod Section. Other Synths have even more.
When it comes to Oscillators 8 controls will not do. Europa has i dont know how many for the Oscillators and three Oscillators in total. Antidote has more than 8 too.
So in your last example i would split the Env Section into one bank of 8 controllers and 8 buttons (buttons 1-4 for switching the envelopes and 5-8 for invert and other button type envelope controls) and another 4/8 section for LFOs or pack them together in one Mod Section.
I love how the Aira Synths show which controlls or active by the lighting which could be used for a dedicated Reason controller too to show that this synth has a 4 control envelope section and this synth a 8 controls section.

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artotaku
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20 Nov 2018

electrofux wrote:
20 Nov 2018
I have composed myself a kindof universal controller for my Reason setup a couple of times now and i settled in the end for a setup that i find nearly optimal.
I have a Launchpad Mini which provides me all the buttons that i need with some color feedback, a Doepfer Pocket Dial which provides for the needed 16 encoders and an Ipad which is basically the Display of the setup.
I like your setup. You could get rid of the Launchpad and Pocket Dial by replacing it with an Akai APC40 Mk2 since it has 16 LED Encoders and a LED button matrix and is fully programmable with MIDI bidirectional with remote protocol, quite similar to the Launchpad communication protocol. It has fewer buttons than Launchpad Pro, though.
Shame it has no display otherwise it would be ideal for Reason IMO.

electrofux
Posts: 863
Joined: 21 Jan 2015

21 Nov 2018

artotaku wrote:
20 Nov 2018
electrofux wrote:
20 Nov 2018
I have composed myself a kindof universal controller for my Reason setup a couple of times now and i settled in the end for a setup that i find nearly optimal.
I have a Launchpad Mini which provides me all the buttons that i need with some color feedback, a Doepfer Pocket Dial which provides for the needed 16 encoders and an Ipad which is basically the Display of the setup.
I like your setup. You could get rid of the Launchpad and Pocket Dial by replacing it with an Akai APC40 Mk2 since it has 16 LED Encoders and a LED button matrix and is fully programmable with MIDI bidirectional with remote protocol, quite similar to the Launchpad communication protocol. It has fewer buttons than Launchpad Pro, though.
Shame it has no display otherwise it would be ideal for Reason IMO.
Yeah that one has alot of stuff. But it is huge and i love the progammability of the Launchpad Mini, i just wish it had more colors. Also currently i use every single button on the Launchpad. And eventually i will replace the Pocket Dial with a Midifighter Twister for its better encoders though the Dial has a crazy good built quality.

I was actually thinking myself of building a dedicated controller but the day i realized that you can have more than one input/output in a Reason Remote Codec i also realized that there are enough controllers on the market that provide you with buttons and encoders. And the display issue could be solved by an Ipad/Iphone/on screen web display.
The issue with the layout not being as hands on as on a dedicated controller is actually not really an issue because something like a perfect layout doesnt exist anyways and alot can be solved by color coding or having the same location throughout all maps and keeping the order of things like they are on the screen.

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emilng
Posts: 99
Joined: 03 Oct 2017

21 Nov 2018

Looks like there's an indiegogo for a 60 knob midi controller


There's also this 60 knob diy solution from bastl https://www.bastl-instruments.com/instr ... ixtyknobs/

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the former were based on the latter

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Faastwalker
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Location: NSW, Australia

22 Nov 2018


electrofux
Posts: 863
Joined: 21 Jan 2015

22 Nov 2018

When it comes to the "perfect" allround Midi Controller i would heavily focus on color coding and lighting. That is the key to having an adaptive device and as i is said it is way faster than LCD labeling though in the perfect world you would have both.

I have a color code which works for me and i have learned that quite quickly.

Red=Oscillator related
Green=Filter stuff
Blue= Modulation (Dark blue Envelopes, light blue LFos
White= Mixing
Purple=FX and Sound Mangling stuff.
Yellow=Other stuff

So when the set of banks for a Synth is presented to me i can instantly realize what is presented to me without reading labels.

Maelstroem eg presents me 2 red banks, 2 green banks, 3 blue banks, 2 light blue banks and some others.
That translates to Osc1 and two (red), Filter1/2 etc. etc.
For Thor it is different 3 red bank, 3 green banks 3Darkbue, 2 lightblue, 1 white, 2 purple etc. And so it goes on. If you know a bit what the Synth you just chose has got you know what banks to choose quickly.

Then you go one Level deeper into the Controls that the bank represents to you. If you have something like the Midifighter Twister you instantly can see how many controls are active because they are lit. It has 16 Controls and not every bank has 16 controls so you instantly get a notion what the first and last controllers are and how many active controls there are in total which is a very important information.

Then you can apply kindof the same color Coding again.

Eg Filter: Cutof Resonance Green, Drive/Filter FM Purple, Envelope Amount Darkblue, LFO Amount Lightblue, Filter Type Yellow (all selectors are yellow on my maps) etc.
EG Oscillators, Red are allways the tunings, yellow Oscillator Type and all sonic stuff like wavshaping what have you is purple. It is not allways super stringent but it works really well if you dont use too many colors and the sections (bank selection and controls are not too crammed together) AND you keep the order of things related to the on screen Synth. If it had 16 Displays below the encoders, the combination of a RGB Launchpad and a Twister would be next to perfect. And layout whise i would just put them side by side. Left all the buttons and right the Encoder Matrix, done. You just cant have this button there and this encoder there because to be universal the cant have a fixed position and that be the best position for everything so i rather would put them togther into blocks.

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