so i’ve been reading these tutorials on http://www.tweakheadz.com/ , and came to the part of midi control surfaces. this is something i had never heard of but basically it’s like a digital mixer-type device but it controls your software sequencer… here is a link to one:
http://www.zzounds.com/item–EVOUC33E
any idea if this type of device would work with renoise?
The sliders and knobs can be assigned to any slider in Renoise through the remote mapper. The assignable buttons are useless in Renoise at the moment, but that is something that most likely will be implemented at some time.
Actually I never looked up exactly what those assignable buttons send (notes, cc-values, sysex perhaps…?) Maybe it’s assignable on some models. Anybody knows?
assignable MIDI buttons should send MIDI 00 or 7F messages, or maybe Sysex, if they are specific for that
ok, my yamaha cs1x keyboard has 6 knobs, two of them are called “assign”… how do i go about mapping those? what is this remote mapper and how is it used? i did a search for it on the tutorial wiki and couldn’t find anything 
I also did a search for it and it is not there yet. You can click on remote mapper move the slider or knob on your synthersizer and you will see that it will assign some values to it. After that (leave the remote mapper window open) you can click on a slider of your vsti that you want to be associated with it. I think this will need some visual presentation but I do not have time to do this at the moment.
Sorry only in Japanese.
But Rick’s comments and these pictures may help you. 
oh! that’s not too complicated! and very useful. now i can tweak my knobs to get some filter disco sounds 
edit: one question about this. is there a limit to the number of knobs/faders you can assign?
if this was unlimited, this would be amazing! you could make a template renoise file that already had all the main sliders you would normally need for a song pre-mapped to one of these consoles!