if you're talking about midi controllers [ctlin] is what you're looking for. the simplest way to figure things out is route the outputs of [ctlin] into number boxes to figure out all the controller numbers; on my oxygen 8 (which has some wacky controller #'s, one knob is 81, one is 14, etc. etc.) once i know which knob is which i made abstractions named [knob1] [knob2] [knob3] etc. that basically just have [ctlin 81] routed to an outlet (for instance). what's great about this is it gives you 0-127 (standard midi values) but you can easily scale those (route that into a [/ 127] to get 0-1 for instance, then multiply that by any value to get 0-n). as long as your keyboard is getting into pd the channel number is pretty irrelevant, you only really need that with multiple controllers coming in on different channels.
hope this helps, by right clicking on [ctlin] and going to "help" it should bring up the help patch explaining in more detail, and from there you should be able to find all the help patches with all the other midi patches [notein] [makenote] etc.