If you have a Roland Rd2000 then here is a control rack for the hardware built entirely with Cantabile Professional 3. There is a great temp buffer editor for this rig by Stuart Pryer here
It is very detailed but because of the software design there are no librarians for this keyboard to allow parameter saving in a PC environment because the RD2000 has poor ‘bidi’ support for sysex. So I used Cantabile to do that task on a very usable level but not as detailed as Stuarts’ but with the ability to add more detail if wished. As a result of using Cantabile the Rack parameters are savable in the Cantabile Song files and provide a pseudo librarian so I can store RD2000 settings that way and recall and send them to the unit. Below are the instruction videos and the rack. It turned out to a sys-ex whopper of a project as far as stretching the C♪3 vehicle and my old mind. @brad even made some nice Roland specific filters for the sysex to clean code up and has my deepest thanks for his help. Here it is …
RD2000 Control Rack Install & Introduction
RD2000 Control Tone Mode 1
RD2000 Control Tone Mode 2 Layers
RD2000 Control Tone Mode 3 Zone Levels, Master FX and Sends
RD2000 Control Tone Mode master EQ
RD2000 Tone Mode Zone FX&Tremolo
RD2000 Control Tone Mode Zone Split
RD2000 Control Master and Zone Transpose
RD2000 Saving a Program to Memory and naming and renaming them
I have been using this for several months and I am happy so far but as always there may be bugs I haven’t uncovered. Thanks for your interest and I hope you enjoy it
I once did all the research to control my Kawai K5000s using the Peavey 1600x slider box, all done by sending sysex. Now you have me wanting to do it again using Cantabile!!!
Awesome piece of work, Dave! I truly appreciate what all went into this.
Terry that’s very cool! I checked that Korg unit out on the nets and it looks very interesting, I hope you get around to a creation when possible. Thanks for the kind comments, I’m glad it’s out there as an example of other things you can do with Cantabile and take a place with all the Control Surface, lighting and automation tools others have made.
I’ve not regretted the purchase, it’s got a lot of pluses for what I’m doing in performance. I use it as a MIDI controller & standalone as a full backup in the event of a laptop mishap that axes Cantabile. I can just turn up the master volume on the RD2000 and carry on till I can get a break to get back right again. I use the rack to sync the PG changes from song to song in addition to using it as a program editor when I’m in patch creation mode.
I started an extraction of my controllers after Terry’s great online class on it, but still had to watch the video several times. By the time I really got elbow deep into it, the gig/rehearsal calls started. Been crazy busy since. Hopefully, I will get it finished sometime this year.
Hi Dave, I just discovered your RD2000 control rack. An amazing piece of work! Thank you so much. I guess the best way to use it is to put it as a background rack and pass data, such as banked program changes for patches, through bindings on a per-song basis. I have tried but can’t get it to work. In addition to the patch changes I would also like to pass System Transpose or Zone Transpose values. It would be great if you would find the time to get me going on this. I’d appreciate! Beerend
I do use the rack for primarily for managing the PG changes that I use to call up the RD-2000 program I want. So for me calling up the tones is done by loading the ones I want into the program slots of the RD2000. It also allows me to have all the layering and such already saved so if Cantabile goes down the programs are still there to call up manually from the RD2000 controls. There were a lot of videos that explained other various aspects of the rack that dealt with actually using Cantabile to build programs so I am wondering how much you have checked out so I know what to advise. Also I run the rack in every song instead of in the BG rack because some functions were not do-able from the BG rack so if I were trying it out I would load it in a song, ensure that it has the proper MIDI routes made from and to the RD2000 and you would be ready to use it in one of the 3 modes I made (Tone, Program & Controller). It sounds like you want to use the Program mode and use the Master transpose I built in so let me know how you want to go.
Thanks for your quick reply! Thing is that embedding the rack in each song appears to slow down song switching considerably, even if pre-loading is selected. And at some points in the setlist I need to change presets rather quickly. I thought I’d prevent that by just passing in the numbers into the pre-excisting RD2000 control rack, but I can’t seem to wire it up correctly. I see your point of just using PC to change the complete preset on the RD, but it would be great to be able to feed in transpose settings and I’m not a hero in sysex… So would I be able to use for example a binding to feed a note value into the TRANSPOSE sub-rack, and thereby use your sysex messaging system to get it across to the keyboard?
Yes, it’s a global setting and is saved with the song when the rack is in a song. I load in the song so the settings are saved for the RD2000 per Cantabile song change, doing that from the BG rack is not. It sounds like you could use a trimmed down version of the rack that loaded fast for your RD2000 transpositions. The RD2000 always has a “Program” loaded in the buffer even when it’s a single tone, how are you calling up the RD2000 presets system (Tone, Program, Scene), manually? I only address Programs and Tones in the rack I made. Knowing that I could figure something out I think.
I extracted the parts of the rack I think you would need and figured a way to embed the master transpose function in the BG rack using a loopback port I created special for it to feed it the MIDI note from a single binding in the song or song state. In addition I moved the PG changes for zone 1-8 to to the song level in a bindings group you can copy to your different songs. If you think that would cover your needs let me know and I will post what you need with a tutorial on setting it up.
That sounds fantastic! In the meantime I tried to reverse-engineer your work on the RD2000 Control Rack and could isolate the sysex messages for transposing the zones. However, I didn’t manage to figure out the system transpose. I found the sysex but can’t get it to feed into the piano. So your solution is very much appreciated! In addition, it will give me the chance to pick your brain and learn a bit more on your approaches to racks and sysex.
Below you’ll find the song file and video explanation of what I hope are the needed items. A note to add is the zone transpose limits are -48 and +48 whereas the Master transpose is -24 and +24. Another note would be that if you aren’t going to need to use some of the bindings you could disable or delete them and you would have less messages to process on state changes. In order to use the Song I sent you would need to name your ports the same as I did and that includes the “RD2000” output port which is physically assigned to the RD 2000 USB MIDI port. Let me know how it goes and we’ll see from there.
Works like a charm! Thank you so much for your help. Highly recommended for other like me with a RD2000 that have to quickly change songs, programs and transpose values.
One case of unexpected behaviour though: When I take all Program Changes out of the equation (by deleting or inactivating the PG Changes rack) the Master Transpose doesn’t work. At least one PGC in one of the zones needs to be active to get the full range of expected behaviour. The active PGC may even be in another state. Can you reproduce that on your RD2000? Can you think of a reason why this happens? No dealbreaker because you can easily work around it, but still…
Cheers,
Beerend
I tested it on my RD2000 and it worked fine with both the PGC bindings group disabled and the zone transpose bindings group disabled. The master transpose should work no matter the state of the zones, you can send a master transpose with all zones off on the hardware and it will still execute the change and it will appear when you next turn on a zone to check it. So, I might have misunderstood the test conditions you are using. Let me know if I did and I can try to re-create it here.
