Hi All,

I have a psr540 that I want to use as a master controller for playing sound samples. It works, but it's quirky, and sometimes inexplicably stops generating sound. I realize that the 540 is not a dedicated midi controller, and was not primarily made for this, but I'm wondering if more can be done to tweak settings.

I've been looking at which buttons remain "hot" when the local is off, and the template is set to master keyboard. Sustain works, transpose works, pitch-bend works (although I can't control the range), and touch sensitiviy off/on work, but that's about it. If I touch almost anything else, the entire DAW set-up just freezes.

Is there anyway to, say, route the 540's 16 track sequencer to align with samples loaded onto a soft seq, and change voices using the hardware buttons? Or program the pitch wheel (or even the volume knob) to make it a mod wheel? The user manual doesn't provide much info.

To anyone who has experience with these boards for doing this, any thoughts would be welcome.

Thanks,
Michael

PS: I suspect the answer is to just get a real controller, but at this point, we're looking at Oct. money at the earliest.

If ever any of my (older) keyboards misbehave I just lift the lid off and remove then replace all ribbon cables!

I don't have a 540. I do have a 630 but I don't know how much is relevant, but I'll plough on nevertheless!

You may be able to stop the DAW setup locking by making sure that the PSR only transmits note / pitchpend (/ Program Change?) information (and maybe sequence controls like start and stop)(You might be able to do this by editing the midi setup of the psr). Any other midi data is liable to be specific to the PSR and so might be causing the DAW to get confused.

Alternatively (or maybe as well) could you configure the DAW to accept only key, wheel and program change events?

Regrettably I don't think the PSR will let you remap controls at all. You can't do this at the DAW end can you?

Thanks for answering. I can do a few minor tweaks with the software. Kontakt will allow pitch bend setting changes (which lock to 1 whole step in local off mode. I think you told me what I already suspected, that the psr won't let me remap, and I need a dedicated controller.

But the 540 can still be useful for playing out ideas quickly to a floppy without having to wait for sampled voices to load.

Michael

Michael,

Check inside Kontact and see if under some menu there is a "midi in" filter where you can set what the software will "see" coming in from the keyboard. While you may not be able to remap the psr, you may be able to block the things going in that are causing the DAW to crash.

Tom

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