Locking a surface to a device

You can lock a control surface or an additional MIDI keyboard/controller to a specific device so that it is always “tweakable” and record enabled, regardless of which track has Master Keyboard input in the sequencer. This enables you to play and record notes for several devices simultaneously from multiple control surfaces/keyboards.

For example, you could lock a control surface to control the Main Mixer, so you can always control overall levels while playing/tweaking other devices. See “Remote controlling the Main Mixer” for an example.

•	The master keyboard device cannot be locked!

If you select the master keyboard in the Preferences, you can click the “Use No Master Keyboard” button. You can then lock this control surface to a device and use its controllers to tweak parameters, but you will not be able to play the device.

•	You can lock several control surfaces to the same device.

However, each control surface can only be locked to one device at a time.

•	Info about which devices are locked (and to which control surfaces) is saved with the song.

Control surfaces/keyboards that use the Easy MIDI Inputs function (see “Automatic set-up using the Easy MIDI Inputs function”) cannot be locked to devices.

Locking a surface

There are basically two methods you can use to lock a Surface:

Using the Surface Locking dialog

1.	Select “Surface Locking...” from the Options menu.

The Surface Locking dialog opens.

In this picture, the dialog has the master keyboard as the selected control surface - this cannot be locked.

2.	Pull down the Surface pop-up from at the top of the dialog and select the control surface you wish to lock to a device.

3.	Next, open the “Lock to device” pop-up menu.

On this pop-up, all devices in the current song are listed. The “Follow Master Keyboard” item which is selected by default, means that the control surface isn’t locked (it instead follows the Master Keyboard Input in the sequencer).

4.	Select the device you wish to lock to the selected control surface from the list.

If the selected control surface supports keyboard shortcuts for selecting mapping variations (see “About mapping variations”) an additional “Always use Mapping” pop-up appears.

On this pop-up you can set whether you wish to lock a specific standard mapping variation or whether the device should switch mapping variations according to keyboard shortcuts. If the former is the case, select the mapping variation from the list. If the latter is the case, select “Follow Keyboard Shortcut”.

5.	Close the dialog when you are done.

The device is now locked to the selected control surface. In Remote Override Edit mode (see “Activating Remote Override Edit mode”) a locked device is shown with a lock symbol in the upper left corner of the device panel.

It’s also possible to lock a control surface to the ReGroove Mixer (see “The ReGroove Mixer”) to control its parameters via Remote!

Using the context menu

A quick way to lock devices is by right-clicking (Win) or [Ctrl]-clicking (Mac) on a device panel to bring up the context menu.

On the context menu, all installed control surfaces (apart from the master keyboard) are listed with the text “Lock to” plus the name of the control surface. Selecting one will lock the device to the control surface. On the context menu the control surface that is currently locked to this device will be ticked.

Unlocking a surface

To unlock a locked device, bring up the context menu for the locked device, and untick the “Lock to” item.’

This unlocks the device and the control surface will now follow master keyboard input.

Another way to unlock a surface is to open the Surface Locking dialog and selecting “Follow Master Keyboard” on the Lock to device pop-up.