BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and we're looking one again at the CME Intelligent Keyboard Controller UF50.

Now, something I talked to the tech support about with this is ,they have not developed mappings for this keyboard outside of the Mackie Control Universal. Mackie Control Universal is the basic Mackie mixer setup. You'll see this in a lot of products as the default. A lot of Novation stuff defaults to this. I know the BCR2000 from Behringer defaults to this. What it is is that it's a mixer configuration where these sliders automatically default to being volume sliders in something like Ableton. If I open Ableton and use this, these will automatically be volume sliders. In Reason, these work as the attack, decay, sustain, release in all of the software synthesizer, and this for example defaults to cutoff, resonance, although it's bizarre is that this is attack and decay and I've never seen it auto-map to that. So really, if you're using this keyboard, you're going to know that at some point you're going to have to do mapping. The transport control does work although evidently not with Sonar, so this is where ACT really is your friend. What I'm going to do is show you how to assign that really quickly to make your life a little bit easier. I'm going to go to my ACT, going to turn it on, make sure it's on, and I'm going to go over to my first volume switch. I'm going to right click and go to remote control, and we want this to learn what this controller is, so I'm going to move this around and then hit learn. It says it's controller 11, and that's the expression so I'm going to take that and now it should map out to volume, and there you go. And I can do this across the board for all these, remote control, wiggle it just a little bit, learn, [SOUNDS LIKE] semi-six, okay, so we have those and I can set one more here. Hit learn, okay.

Now let's see if I want to -- if I want to, if I want to have a pan set up as well. I can just twiddle this, it should learn that controller, okay, and now we have a pan set, and I'll do the same for the pan here. Now, one thing to be aware of is once you start setting multiple controls, it can be a little bit confusing. Now what I'm going to do is since the transport doesn't seem to work in Sonar at all, I can't seem to map it either.

I'm going to go into Ableton, so I'm going to close this, don't save, go to Live. You know that was pretty bizarre with the MIDI configuration there but you will notice you can map all these independently. I think it just depends on the DAW that you're using so let's switch over to Live. Live seems to work with this keyboard a little bit differently, in a lot of ways a lot better. It seems to map a little bit better than it did in Sonar. Another thing to pay attention to is that you can change up your key assignments using the UF editor. Okay, here we are, and let's see if our transport is working, press play. It doesn't work off the bat but lets go into our MIDI assign mode, edit MIDI map, go here, select this guy, there we go. So you'll see in Ableton it's very, very easy to get this working correctly with the software, and the reason I had absolutely no trouble was it automatically mapped in Reason, so I'm not sure what the deal was with Sonar but it didn't seem to pick it up, so let's drop a clip in just so we have something to work with.

[BILL TESTS TRANSPORT CONTROL OF THE UF50 HOOKED UP TO ABLETON LIVE]

Well there it is. We got the transport working in Ableton and I'm sure that the -- there are many other ways you can use this control in Ableton. Now let's check out what the deal was with that multiple parameters assignment thing that happened to us back there. Let's just grab a simple effect. Let's grab an auto-filter and let's grab a loop. Now, after what happened with the transport and what -- Now after what happened with the MIDI assignment in -- Now after what happened with the MIDI assignment in Sonar. I want to make sure that's not going to happen to me in Ableton, so I'm going to drag a track into here, and I'm going to drag an auto-filter and I want to try to assign these patches.

[BILL HOLLAND STARTS PLAYING A SET IN ABLETON AND ATTEMPTS CONTROL ASSIGNMENTS]

All right. Now let's see if this actually worked. Play this back

[BILL HOLLAND STARTS PLAYING A SET IN ABLETON AND STARTS CONTROLLING FILTERS USING THE UF50]

Well, I would say it worked in Ableton, so I guess if you're going to use the CME UF50 keyboard, Ableton is the way to go, but if you're going to use Sonar, get ready to do a little bit of patching and MIDI assigning, and again that's the UF Editor. It can be used for doing custom assigns, go right here, and this allows you to do all of your editing. You have all your CC values in here, and you can assign whatever you want to your controller.

Well, that's a pretty basic walkthrough of the UF 400e with the UF50 keyboard, but for now I'm Bill Holland with Gearwire.Com, and I'm going to be back in the next video to show you how to use the new Waldorf module that comes with this keyboard and assign MIDI controls to it, but for now I'm Bill Holland and you've been listening to Gearwire.