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Add a control surface to Acid Pro for hands-on mixing mojo

Sony Acid Pro 6

By Craig Anderton

OBJECTIVE:
Use a control surface to provide physical control for various parameters in Acid Pro 6, such as mixing, panning, transport control, etc.

BACKGROUND:
Acid Pro 6 has templates for the Mackie Control Unit and Frontier Design Tranzport, but also a “generic” template so you can use other controllers such as the Peavey PC1600x, the MIDI fader layer from a digital mixer, and the like. We’ll assume your controller is hooked up to your computer via MIDI, and set up to generate continuous controller messages suitable for fader control (e.g., fader 1 sends out MIDI controller 7 over channel 1, fader 2 sends out controller 7 over channel 2, etc.).

STEPS

1. Go Options and check External Control, then go Options > Preferences.

2. Click on the MIDI tab, and select the MIDI ports that connect to your control surface (or select USB Audio Device if you’re using a control surface that sends/receives MIDI data over USB). Click on Apply.

3. Click on the External Control & Automation tab. Select Generic Control under Available Devices, then click on Add.

4. Double-click on Generic Control in the Device field; the Configure General Control dialog box appears. Enter the number of channels supported by your controller (typically 8 or 16). Then to configure the control surface for mixing, under View Function Group, select Audio Channels.

5. To “bind” a parameter to a fader, double-click on the parameter you want to control (in this example, it’s Channel 1 fader). The MIDI Commands box appears.

6. Click on Learn, then move the fader you want to assign to the parameter. The Edit MIDI Commands box gives details about the data it received. Click on OK.

7. Repeat steps 6–7 until you’ve mapped the parameters you want to control to the physical controls on your control surface.

TIPS

To bind Transport functions to buttons, in the Configure Generic Control window, under View Function Group select Transport. Then follow steps 5 and 6, except push the desired button instead of moving a fader.

To control automation with the control surface, you must put the control surface into Automation mode. To do this, under View Function Group choose Assign, and bind Toggle Automation Mode to a button. This toggles between controlling just the faders (trim mode) and controlling the automation curves (automation mode).

 

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