ok, she's been powered up at home, & i've had an explore for an hour or so.
Basically, ....I can't wait to play out to a dance floor with this!!
My biggest concern was it would struggle to sound good & be loud enough, being only USB bus powered. That doesn't seem to be a problem at all. The main outputs & booth outputs both sound great, & there's a nice healthy level from the headphones as well. ....whether the headphone output will cut it in a club, well we'll have to wait & see. There's always the option of routing the cue output out the booth output & in to a spare channel on the mixer if more headphone volume is needed though!
I tried mixing manually, using the touch strips for pitch bend, & that very quickly feels perfectly natural. Using the touch strip to navigate round the track in "drop" mode (or whatever it's called) seems very intuitive as well.
Slicer & Loop Roll. ....Wow! That's going to be so much fun. Just got to be careful I don't over use these features though!
One other thing worth mentioning.... a small amount of my work is DJing normal parties & weddings. It pays quite well if you get in to the higher end of the market, so why not!! I've previously had whatever controller i've been using plugged in to another mixer, purely to be able to add a microphone in to the mix. ....I've just tried running a mic in to itch, & I reckon the mic channel on this will probably be good enough quality to do away with the 2nd mixer (there's certainly none of the delay & phasing issues that seemed to be a problem with the VCI-300). As long as Itch 2 turns out to be stable, i'd be happy to go straight in to the main PA with this, & use it for music & mic mixing duties.
All I want now is midi mapping for the sampler, & I think this will be pretty close to my ideal rig!!
