[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and you are looking at the Novation Remote 25SL, an extremely powerful keyboard from Novation. It combines their mixer unit with...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

...keyboard of weighted keys...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

...which can control hardware or software depending on what you’re doing and you can use this to DJ or play live or do whatever you want. The really nice thing is it auto-maps very, very well, it has a program called Automap which basically it looks at what okay what plugin are you using and it maps to that. You can also customize knobs. For example, this was originally not filter, cutoff, and resonance. I changed that, and you can even assign other things. If I go into my -- I have a Z3TA open in Cakewalk, and I can, if I want to, you know, if I have release control for example, I can use the Automap to map to release, so now I have sustain and release as well, and you’ll notice up here it changes to AEG sustain and release. So now, when I play back...,

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

...really easy way to set the controllers custom. Also you can use the pads here for drums. So, if I had a drum kit open, I could go to that and actually...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

...control my drums from here.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

Not quite as good as the pads on the Akai but I still like these a lot. They’re great for playing live because you can actually, you know, lay down your synth land and come over here and either...

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

...or play over here.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

And notice that the latency is very low. Also we have a mixer over here which this can be tied to any mixer interface you might have in Sonar. I can use it to mix my levels if I want. Again, you have to assign this using Automap, and if I click on my Automap on my computer, it’ll actually -- See here display, view, user, effects, instrument, mixer. If you saw my video on the Novation Nocturn recently, you’ll notice that it’s the same type of layout that’s present in Automap. It shows up here, and then I can click on user, effects, instrument or mixer, and then you can assign within your auto-mapping software which one it is.

Now, if I go here, you can select templates by hitting template, and I can then navigate if I go up one. See, we have user 1, user 2, Reason, Automap, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Vanguard 3, Vanguard 2, Vanguard 1, HALion, Z3TA 1, 2, Albino, ARP2600 from Arturia, Korg Legacy Instruments, GMedia, Native Instruments B4, Battery, etc., Novation Instruments, and going up the other way we have an Ableton Live auto-map so really, really useful.

Right now, I have this hooked to Sonar. I know you can’t see it but it is attached. If I hit play, I can go to template bank program or tempo, and I can set the master tempo for this track. Now, you’ll notice it’s the same speed as before. That’s because this is not acting as a master. It’s acting as a slave so it doesn’t really matter what my BPM is set to. I have my templates, banks programs. I’m going to take it back to template for now, and you’ll see here I can also navigate between my maps doing this simply from here.

Now, all of these have defaults. If I go to any of my numerous plugins, you’ll notice that all of these values will change up...,

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

...and that the levels that these all control are completely different. For example, I’ll go back over to my Dimension Pro, and now you’ll notice this controls completely different values. Sometimes, it doesn’t even match up, so if there is no auto-mapping for a specific instrument, you actually have to go in and do it yourself. In this case, I can attach these sliders to my LFO.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

So moving on, you’ll notice again the drum pads. We also have pitch and mod control...,

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

...and an XY controller which can be assigned to any variety of parameters. I can assign this to things like my filter cutoff and resonance as well.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING WITH THE NOVATION REMOTE 25SL]

And also, if you look at the rows on the side here, you can select which of these sections you’re in. On the right here, you can assign CC and then RPN values to the left as well. And now you’ll notice for each of these that these buttons act differently than the knobs. These are absolute switches versus these, which are rotary switches that go through the whole value rotation from 0 to 127, and again you have your pads which are a separate entity. We also have the transport control which allows us to move back and forth in a track, and reverse we have octave control for the keyboard, a loop function, and a record button.

So that’s it. That’s the Remote SL from Novation. My name is Bill Holland, and you are watching Gearwire.Com.