Originally Posted by
Chael
I bought an APC 40 for producing with Ableton, right out of the box it rocks, its simple to use and has enough knobs, faders and pads to map any way you would want or wish to. I "dj'd" with ableton for a couple of years but after a while it started to take the fun out of it for me, I realised that first and foremost ableton is a DAW and production environment, that's not to say you can do dj sets with it, many people can do truly amazing things with it but I felt myself getting a little stagnant, the warping of tracks / midi mapping macros and general preparation side of things can take up a lot of time. Eventually I made the switch to traktor to get back to what I felt was a more traditional sense of DJing. I still use the APC 40 with traktor from time to time, using both internal and external mixing modes, the mapping was a little tedious at first but once you get your head around states and mapping of the LED's (Theres a good DJTT article floating around online that explains this very well) you can do amazing things with it, for me the APC 40 provides more than enough features to make it a true workhorse in any set up. I couldn't recommend it enough