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Defining Control Surface Behaviour
We define what behaviour should occur when particular widgets are pressed/turned/moved/etc in .zon files.
If you remember in our CSI.INI file, for each surface we listed a number of things:
MidiSurface AlphaTrack 8 8 AlphaTrack.mst AlphaTrack UseZoneLink NoAutoMapSends AutoMapFX NoAutoMapFXMenu NoAutoMapFocusedFX
In this example, the AlphaTrack.mst was where we defined what widgets were on the surface.
The next item to the right, in this case 'AlphaTrack' is the name of a Zones folder. Inside this folder, we should create whatever .zon files we want that relate to the widgets on this surface. We can also use subfolders, and subfolders of subfolders and so on, in order to organize our .zon files.
Note: You can put them all in one file, you can break them out in dozens of files, totally up to you. CSI will read in all the .zon files it finds in this folder, including all subfolders, so do whatever you find easier to manage.
Inside these .zon files, we can create as many Zones as we like, to map the widgets on this surface to the actions we want to trigger. As you'll see on that page, we can also switch between currently active zones, compose zones out of other zones, etc.
At this stage there are primarily two types of Zones that we can define:
- Zones that control general Reaper functionality. eg. the Tracks in our project, the Transport controls, our Track Sends, etc
- Zones that control VST instruments/FX inside Reaper. eg. How to map the parameters of your EQ, Reverb, etc on the selected track across your surfaces.
They are both defined as Zones in .zon files, but there are some additional details for FX Zones that are worth discussing.