Parameters and functions for each Reason Essentials device are mapped to controls on supported control surface devices. As soon as you have added your control surface(s) in the Preferences, you can start tweaking parameters!
This means that you set Master Keyboard Input to a track in the sequencer to route the control surface(s) to the track’s device in the rack. You can bypass this functionality by locking a control surface to a specific device - see “Locking a surface to a device”. Or you can simply use Remote Override mapping (see “Remote Override” for specific parameters - these will then be mapped to the selected controls regardless of Master Keyboard Input.
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The Reason Essentials device associated with the track with Master Keyboard Input will have its parameters standard mapped to logical controls (faders, buttons etc.) on the control surface device.
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E.g. if a Subtractor has Master Keyboard Input, your control surface will control the most important Subtractor parameters. If you set Master Keyboard Input to a track connected to an NN-XT, the control surface will now control parameters on the NN-XT device, and so on for each device. There are standard mapping variations for most devices as well - see “About mapping variations”.
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Supported control surfaces with dedicated transport controls will be standard mapped to the equivalent transport controls in Reason Essentials.
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If you do not have transport controls on your control surface you can still map transport controls to controllers using Remote Override mapping - see “Remote Override mapping”.
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Other important functions such as switching target track in the sequencer, selecting patches, Undo/Redo can also be remote controlled.
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Reason Essentials parameters are “standard-mapped” to supported control surface devices. There is nothing the user needs to set up to remote control any Reason Essentials device. You can, however, use Remote Override mapping to map a specific parameter to a specific control if you should want to.
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By using standard mapping, the remote mapping for each device will be the same for any new song created in Reason Essentials, given you have the same set of control surfaces connected.
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If you use Remote Override mapping (see “Remote Override”), the overrides will be saved with the current song, but won’t be there if you create a new song.
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The “Control Surface Details” document contains some information about the standard mappings of the different control surface models. But you can also activate Remote Override Edit mode to see which parameters for each device are mapped to your control surface(s) - see “Remote Override”.
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Note that if you have several control surfaces connected, some parameters could be mapped to controls on more than one control surface.
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This is not a conflict of any kind, but simply a consequence that stems from the fact that all control surfaces by default follow Master Keyboard Input. By using Surface Locking (see below) or Remote Override (see “Remote Override”) you have full control over your control surfaces.
Since there are often more parameters on a device than there are controls on the control surface, there are standard mapping variations available for most devices. When selecting a standard mapping variation, a new set of parameters will be mapped to the controls on your control surface for a selected Reason Essentials device.
For example, if you have a control surface with 8 rotary knobs routed to a Subtractor, the knobs may control filter parameters by default. Selecting variation 2 may make the knobs control the oscillator settings, variation 3 may control LFOs and so on.
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For devices that support keyboard shortcuts, you switch between mapping variations by holding down [Ctrl]+ [Alt](Win) or [Cmd]+[Option](Mac) and press the numerical keys [1] to [10] (not the numerical keypad), where [1] selects the default standard mapping.
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How many mapping variations are available depends on the control surface and the Reason Essentials device selected. The variation selected will stay active until you switch MIDI input to another device (or select another variation). If you switch back to the same device it will have its default standard mapping (variation [1]).
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Locked devices (see “Locking a surface to a device”) can also be locked to a specific mapping variation.
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