On friday I went to Sónar Barcelona 2011, which just happened to be 2 minutes walk down the road from my flat, with the main aim of getting my hands on the new Novation Twitch to see if it's as good as the youtube videos suggest. tl;dr version: yes it is.
Here's the video in case anyone hasn't already seen it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytM05o1wqhw
I apologise for the lack and poor quality of photos, I only had my Blackberry with me.
Let's start with a suitably embarrassing photo of me holding the controller I've been obsessing over since its announcement a couple of months ago (and wearing my shiny DJTT t-shirt with a ridiculous ableton headband):
The guy in the green T shirt in the background is Sam, a Vinyl traditionalist who carries crates of records to gigs yet confusingly enough works for ableton.
Layout & Build Quality
That picture gives you an idea of size; it's a bit smaller than I expected. In use though it's not fiddly (and I have big hands), the pads are well spaced out as are the EQ knobs and faders. The only issues I had were minor ones; firstly that the line faders seemed quite loose, which I was assured was down to the fact that this was a pre production unit that has been used to death on every demo and testing process they've done (in which case the fact that every feature was still working perfectly is promising for build quality). The other problem was LED brightness, but this was in the middle of the day in a very bright white tent under the spanish sun so all the controllers in there were struggling. I later saw it in a demonstation indoors and the LEDs were plenty bright enough.
Mapping & Traktor
I spent a couple of hours talking to Simon from Novation, who's brand manager for the Twitch and also the guy who answered my email with questions regarding Traktor mapping a few weeks ago (here). We spoke a lot about the Twitch's development, and what became abundantly clear is that they have put a lot of time and effort into mapping this to ITCH, both in terms of firmware and software. It remains to be seen how well it works with Traktor, and what some of those magical midi mappers we have around here such as flashflooder might be able to do with it given the chance, but in ITCH it works extremely well. I was a little worried beforehand that the touchstrip might be unresponsive and that fine adjustments would be difficult, but as it turns out it responds to movements as fine as a fingertip rolled across it. Of note to those of you who might be interested in creating a Traktor mapping of your own is the fact that not only the pads but also the touchstrips have different midi messages depending on which of the 4 performance modes you're in. This will make complex mappings a lot easier without the need for so many modifiers.
Use in ITCH
Regarding how it works in ITCH, most of the features are clear from the video above but of course there is more complexity to them than can be explained in 6 minutes. If anyone has any specific questions I'm happy to answer them, I had a good long play so I got a fairly clear understanding of the specifics. The slicer, which is the feature a lot of people are raving about, is a lot of fun. It's very adjustable with the touchstrip, which effectively becomes a double parameter control in slicer mode, and once you've got to grips with it it's quite intuitive in use and is a nice advancement on the classic loop roll. There's also a feature in one of the needle drop modes whereby the LED lights up in the middle and placing your finger anywhere to the right speeds the track up and anywhere to the left plays the track backwards, with speed depending on how far your finger is from the middle. I can't think of a way I'd use it in my workflow, but I'm sure someone can.
Part 2 to follow...
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