Controlling Reaktor with your external hardware isn’t very difficult. Just click Reaktor’s little MIDI Learn button, tweak some knobs and you’re set right? Well… not if you’re using FL Studio.
FL Studio’s MIDI Learn works a little different from most other hosts. Its last tweaked parameter -> link to controller in the wrapper menu is an easy way of assigning any control to the knob/slider/whatever on your external controller.
The multi-link function is even easier. Tweak a number of controls on your soft synth, turn the same amount of knobs on your controller, done! (If you’re not exactly sure what I’m talking about here you can check the FL Studio manual for more info on linking to external controllers).
Unfortunately FL Studio’s way of linking controls doesn’t work with Reaktor. No matter which knobs & parameters you change in Reaktor, the “last tweaked parameter” never becomes active so there is nothing to link to.
Now how is this possible?! What good are all these knobs and sliders on our controllers if we can’t even assign them to anything…
Luckily there are a few simple steps you can take to set things up to be able to control Reaktor in FL Studio with your external gear.
- First you’ll need to make sure that the Reaktor objects you want to control can receive MIDI by ticking the Activate MIDI In checkbox.
- Assign a Global ID to the Reaktor object to make sure it can be linked to a MIDI CC.
- Now that the object has a number it can be assigned to something that FL Studio can automate. The MIDI Out channel is perfect for this task. Right mouse click on the a knob in the MIDI Out channel and select “Configure” to set the same Global ID number as a MIDI CC. In the example the Global ID of Concept X’s attack slider has a value of 505.
- Now that the Reaktor object is linked to a native FL Studio plug-in, you can simply link these controls to your MIDI controller. Tweak the MIDI Output knob, last tweaked parameter -> link to controller, turn knob hardware controller, accept! Concept X’s attack slider will now respond to my controller.
Not extremely difficult, but quite easy to forget. If you know a better/faster way to do all this please do share.
