The future of DJ controllers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
abdul_tom
remember all those buttons you got on your computer
You mean I drop $800 on a control surface, and I still have to use my keyboard and mouse?
Seriously, one day some company will truly understand what a controllerist needs from a MIDI controller, and that day the standard will be set and we will have the "steering wheel, three pedals and a gearstick" interface that everyone else will be measured by. Right now everyone's thrashing around trying to work out what the minimum set of controls are, and it turns out there's a lot more needed than originally thought.
Making a MIDI-only controller that maps the "mixing desk" idiom to the DJing problem misses the point - each channel needs way more controls than just a play button and a column of POTs. How do you drop a loop point on that channel? The same goes for the "two decks and a mixer" idiom where the idea of launching more than two sounds at the same time requires you to "special case" the other decks with modal keys (i.e. If the foot switch is down, decks controls are piped to C & D).
There has to be a better way that doesn't try to recreate an old interface and repurpose it to the problem of controlling sound sources, and I think the key is that we only have two hands - there are only a few things that you can do to a sound source at any time, and there are only a few points in the sound chain where you would want to insert effects or interact with a device (a deck, a sampler or an FX unit). Map those operations to an interface and we might have something!
I have a feeling that future DJ tutorials will start to sound more like:
"Press Play to launch a new soundsource into group A, using nudge to get it into sync, then switch your attention to FX Send Group B to tweak the highpass filter on everything kicking off there. Use the crossfader to gently fade from group A to group D and then switch back to the Global FX..."