hey all
this is in part a selfish offer here, but may well help out a few members on the forum as well as me so thought i'd stick it on....
The way I have both my old VCI-100 and now my VCI-400 set up is to have the tempo fader on the controller set up to work a very small range, only going about 2.5% in either direction. So when i'm beatmatching (and not syncing obviously) I have some keyboard shortcuts set up to jump the tempo up in larger steps to get ballpark correct, then use use the very fine resolution of the pitchfaders to get exact.
This was fine and easy to spot/remember what keys were what when i just had the 2 channel VCI-100, but now I have the 400 i've rearranged the keys to include keys for all 4 decks as well as some other functions and triggers/load buttons for samples.
I've been searching for a while to find a company who could produce a custom rubber overlay for they keys, both to label all the keys and also to protect the lappy and make them waterproof in case of spilled drinks in a club.
Have finally found one but they arent set up to provide individual or one off designs, only really big runs. There is a significant and very large set up cost to get these made, with the idea that this would be made back in bulk orders of a couple of hundred printed units.
However I dont have 100 laptops! Now i'm not looking to sell 100 units by any means, but if i could get maybe 10 people interested that would make it something that was viable, and more people above that would bring the cost down further. These would be about £15 each, maybe cheaper depending on numbers, and i wouldnt be making any profit on these (and indeed still paying about £50 towatds the set up costs on top of my own £15 for mine).
So a little more detail on how the mapping is set up, each deck has a tempo up and down button as well as reset to zero, and each also has a tap tempo button to help quickly grid songs. Decks C and D also have a button for cycling through sample deck, music track and external input, and a button for turning vinyl/timecode control on and off.
Across the number keys there is triggers for all 4 sample banks on each side, and you can hold shift and press these to load into the sample slot from the browser.
You also have some buttons top left to switch between two and 4 deck view and a quick button to change to browser view and back again.
Originally I had it pretty multi coloured but have scaled it back to basically black blue and white to keep the colours and hence cost down, but also to match the EGE VCI-400 and newest VCI-100 colours. These would be professionally printed by a company that specialises in printing these types of keyboard overlays and would be fantastic quality.
If people had any ideas for one or two more functions that could be added over to the right side of the keyboard, around and next to the Enter button, we could add stuff in but once the design was set the problem, and the whole point, is that there cant be any design changes or its another expensive set up fee, so only works if people are interested in the layout exactly as is :-) Not gonna be especially common I know but as I say if even 10 people like the look of it then would be worth looking into.
Anyway a picture of the current layout idea is attached, let me know what you all think and if anyone is interested.
Lappy-Buttons-Layout-v2.jpg
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