The Ultimate Touch OSC Guide - Pt 1 (Setting up Touch OSC in Reaper)

hey i'm tim corpus composer and sound designer and today we're going to take a look at touch osc right here fancy stuff and we're going to make it work on a pc so if you have an old ipad an old cell phone that you want to use something fancy android iphone you can add all these amazing little buttons and things to make it work there's also a variety of different faders and things like that which are super useful so we're going to take a look at setting this up [Music] so i use touch osc pretty much on a daily basis i use it for reaper obs adobe finale all sorts of different things it's amazing to have these kind of shortcuts in order to get from different tools different programs especially in programs like finale which are really poorly set up and accessing tools is very difficult touch osc is super helpful it's also nice in my workflow with reaper when composing when you want to do key switches or if you want to again access different tools now i've set up a variety of different templates with touch osc i've got one just for shortcuts which is super helpful again you can see it's super colorful so it's really nice and bright easy to work with and there's a variety of different tools that make it really really useful and so let's go ahead and see how to program some of this in to help your workflow so you're gonna head to hexler.net right here and download touch osc if we check out the products you're going to want mark ii that's the newest one another useful piece is protocol which is a test utility so it'll test the signals that you're sending so you can see what you're doing i'll show that a little later another thing you're going to want to download this is bridge bridge is going to kind of be the in-between connector for your ipad and your pc so this is the app we're looking for by hexler llc you can see that i'm downloading it for the uh first time on this one so let's just go ahead and get the new one this is mark two let's go ahead and get that downloaded and we'll set it up so the first thing we need to do is activate the bridge so you head over here to your start menu after you've installed it of course and let's just search bridge touch osc bridge click that and it is on nothing happens it doesn't look like anything's happening but it is running in the background and here on the computer let's go ahead and launch touch osc as well just go to our search i've got mine already locked in here so let's go ahead and launch that and you'll see there's a little bit of a unregistered copy if you pay for it um you'll remove this kind of like with reaper so now we've got this bridge connected between the two and we've got a black screen on our ipad and a black screen on our desktop so looking at the desktop we've got normal controls your file to open save and export edit obviously editing things and you can change your view from the editor you can toggle that off and this is what the performance view looks like this little dot here is the way to get out of that and then of course the help will open up the information um and also there is some good stuff in the documentation on hexler's website but it's it's a little tough to read so when you design anything in here these are all the parameters and the great thing here is the document tree it's layers so if you were to build something out like a button all this information populates let's say there's a box you know you can see here in the document tree what's above what you can lock things uh which really makes it a lot easier to to work so in here we can control the width and height of the entire uh screen here so right now this is a portrait but it'd be easier if this was landscape so let's go ahead and swap that here real quick and we can see that it looks a little better for an ipad you can also change the background color if you really wanted to do that it's a little absurd but it's what you can do and you can handle any comments of course if you're making templates for other people that's super useful there is a great community on facebook makes uh different osc templates so be sure to check those out there's some good stuff there so back to the blank screen let's add a button real quick just to show this and like i said on this populated panel here we have all of its information this is the name of what the box is so it doesn't add any text but it is just this name for your own purposes you can move the things you add you can change their parameters color for the background like i said you can lock this from here or from the tree and you can hide it if you have to work behind it changing its interactivity will make it kind of useless on the ipad and if you want to remove the background you can do that and it does have corners so let's make this a really bright color here and let's add just the edges and you can see that so it gives you a lot of variability for however you want to design this which is great this can be a really personal stylized customized thing just for you the orientation is really important in fader so let's add a fader real quick just to see this so here we can see that things are at the bottom and going to the top if you wanted it to go from the left to the right you go east and it's actually on the west side but it will go to the east so that kind of the direction that you choose is going to be the um ending position for where you're going like the maximum position and each item has its own other special specifications we'll go through those a little more later but that's good to know so everything you're doing here on the desktop obviously it's not impacting your ipad at all one way to do that i like to edit and create templates in the desktop version and then send it to the ipad so if you click this little wi-fi looking signal on the desktop you can see the editor network and we're going to use this computer this is the desktop computer as the server so let's enable that and now on our ipad we're going to click that same icon and we can see available servers the desktop connect that and we can see all the things that we created on our desktop are here and we can interact with them now they're not sending any signals but they you know they do exist and this is kind of the play mode on the ipad and if you wanted to exit this you hit that white dot at the top right corner select okay and you're disconnected and this has stayed on the ipad which is great that's super useful and you could save this hit that corner and you can hit that down arrow to save you see i already have one that's called test but let's go ahead and overwrite that and then if we were to close this close that out and open oh there's test boom everything's back so that's how you're going to save your templates and you can see here on the ipad we have all sorts of the similar information from the desktop that's all on the ipad so you can edit this on the go if you want to like i said i find it easier to work on the desktop so let's go ahead back to the desktop and let's remove all this stuff and what we need to figure out is connecting the ipad so that it sends information to the desktop computer so let's click on this link button here on the ipad and you can see the connections now we have bridge running already on the desktop so let's go down to bridge click that and let's turn on this connection now you could send this to multiple hosts multiple computers if you're working that way i'm just working directly with one station so let's browse and that is my desktop let's pull that up midi let's turn that connection on select the bridge go to osc and you can turn this on as well if you need to i've used this before putting in my ip address and if you do this way you can send port to 8000 and receive port at 9 000. and now we're connected and we can send signals to our daw okay so let's reconnect our ipad to our server desktop and we have a blank screen again let's go ahead and make a button and over here on our parameters we're going to ignore the values for now but let's take a look at the midi controls so this is where we can decide what signals we're sending um obviously we want it enabled you could turn off the send which is good in some instances a lot which i'll cover in the next video and receive which is also important and again there are multiple connections for hosts that you could have for this we're just using one because we're only sending it to one station so your channel you could choose your midi channel and the cc you want to hit and also the value so this does look kind of confusing but if you wanted to do say channel 14 control 6 you want to go to a constant and then you can put that in there and now the value is going to be anywhere between 0 and 127 which is what we want because we're going to be hitting just we're only caring about the channel and the controller everything else coming after it we want all of it if we were to hit um if we were to select only 126 through 127 then it would have to abide by those parameters there's some great videos out there explaining this type of information i encourage you to go check that out if you need help with it and i'll explain a little bit more about this section in another video but for right now we just want to get a button that works so we put in channel 14 cc6 for this button and we see this button on our ipad we can push it and uh you know it'll not do anything but i do have reaper open right now you can see i'm recording the background too but let's add a track now i know that if i send a signal on channel 14 cc 6 that something will happen because i've already programmed that in my actions list so let me hit that button on the ipad now and we can see that the track went yellow so making that happen is part of the action list with reaper if you check this out find shortcut and then i push the button on the ipad it'll show you what was going on so it was sws set selected track to custom color 11. you can see that right there midi channel 14 cc6 which is what i sent now we could change this to whatever we want let's go ahead and say it's uh for number six let's add an action i'm gonna push the button on the ipad and we are gonna override the mapping and now let's select this track and i'll push the button on the ipad and the color changed so this is a really simple example of what can be done but you can imagine there's a lot that you could do with sending midi signals to your daw so that's setting up touch osc uh let me know if you have any questions getting that set up in the next video we'll look at some more practical uses using some of the different buttons and settings and you know making your workflow better thanks for watching be sure to like and subscribe to see the next video and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Tim Corpus

Views: 1,108

Keywords: reaper, daw, audio production, touchosc, hexler, PC, android, ipad, apple, music engineer, producer, composer, composing, spitfire audio, cinesamples, logic, pro tools, ableton, protokol, osc, open sound control, OBS, finale, cockos reaper, production workflow, control surface, MIDI, mixing, adobe creative cloud, how to, tutorial, midi guide

Id: hmuhoDx70QM

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021