Blog homepage

An Introduction to Controllers for Composers

Community & Events / Interactive Audio / Interactive Music

During her presentation at our Interactive Music Symposium, Ressa Schwarzwald talked about how using controllers could make composers' lives easier. Below, you’ll find a summary of key points from her talk, where she mentioned a lot of great resources for composers who are looking to dip their toes into the world of controllers!

DAWs and MIDI Controllers

Control Surface Integrator (CSI) in REAPER

According to the Control Surface Integrator (CSI) official documentation project, CSI is “a REAPER plugin that aims to let you integrate your hardware control surfaces into REAPER with a much higher level of control than is possible out of the box.”

Ressa shares a couple of videos that she recommends composers check out to get started with CSI:

Instruments with MPE Protocol

MPE stands for MIDI Polyphonic Expression and, according to ROLI, “allows digital instruments to behave more like acoustic instruments in terms of spontaneous, polyphonic sound control.”

In the following video, Ressa demonstrates MPE with her ROLI Seaboard, which she uses to control a wineglass instrument in Kontakt. You see her modify a few mapped settings, specifically for the Slide (also known as MIDI CC 74) and Press gestures.

She recommends you check out ROLI’s official video, How to use a Seaboard RISE with Kontakt, to get a good overview and learn how to make any Kontakt instrument preset respond to the Slide, Press, and Glide gestures of a ROLI Seaboard.

Using your gamepad as a MIDI controller

If you want to use your gamepad as a MIDI controller, choose Options from the main menu in REAPER, open Preferences, display the MIDI Devices screen, and then click on the Add joystick MIDI button. In the video below, Ressa shares her results, using her Xbox controller as a MIDI controller.

Mobile devices as MIDI control panels

You can also use mobile devices as MIDI control panels! Here are three apps for this purpose that Ressa mentions during her presentation:

Metagrid: Grid-based controller for iPad.

Metapad: Gesture-based controller for iPhone.

TouchOSC: Next generation modular control surface which works on mobile and desktop.

Wwise and MIDI Controllers

Ressa previously wrote an entire article about working with MIDI in Wwise and you can give that a read here.

Be sure to give Ressa’s presentation a watch, where she goes into more detail about using MIDI controllers with Wwise, MIDI controllers and game engines, making patches in Max/MSP and Pure Data, using real instruments as MIDI controllers in REAPER, and pushing the boundaries with microcontrollers!

 

Ressa Schwarzwald

Ressa Schwarzwald

Audio Lead at Creative Mobile, interactive audio geek and explorer!

 @the_ressium

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

More articles

Interactive Audio: Wwise, Community, and beyond!

At Audiokinetic, we strive to empower the interactive audio community, support it as it grows and...

23.8.2016 - By Audiokinetic

Music Driven Animation - A Simple Method

The Wwise 2019.1 release introduced Wwise Events triggered in Music Segments, a "music cues"...

11.12.2019 - By Peter "pdx" Drescher

Achieving Cinematic Scoring through Proactive Audio

When was the last time you truly noticed the music playing in a game during an epic battle? Game...

8.7.2020 - By Sonic Bloom

Exploring the New Impacter Plug-in

Overview Impacter is a new source plug-in inspired by the spirit of the original SoundSeed Impact...

19.3.2021 - By Ryan Done

How to Create Audio-Reactive Objects Using Wwise and Unity

I would like to show you how to use RTPCs to move game objects in Unity, and how to create...

9.2.2023 - By Tomokazu Hiroki

Mastering a Game with Wwise | Part 2: Mastering Suite Presets and How to Use Them

In the first part of this two-part series, we covered how to approach mastering a game. In this...

22.2.2024 - By Loïc Couthier & Danjeli Schembri

More articles

Interactive Audio: Wwise, Community, and beyond!

At Audiokinetic, we strive to empower the interactive audio community, support it as it grows and...

Music Driven Animation - A Simple Method

The Wwise 2019.1 release introduced Wwise Events triggered in Music Segments, a "music cues"...

Achieving Cinematic Scoring through Proactive Audio

When was the last time you truly noticed the music playing in a game during an epic battle? Game...