I love the feel of a button... what does the future hold?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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I love the feel of a button… what does the future hold?

In this post I’m going to make some sweeping generalisations, so please try not to be offended :smiley:

These days with all our multitude of controller based options, from the midifighter to the 4midiloop (chuckle), we have more ways to control our music than ever. The one thing that most of them have in common is physical controls, be they buttons, faders, knobs, jogwheels or whatever.

But a lot of DJs, particularly those who’ve been around for longer, still use things like the technics 1200, and this they often say is because they like the feel of it, the level of contact with the music. I’m from a new generation, and while I enjoy playing with vinyl, I don’t miss it when I’m playing with controllers. It’s more of a curiosity subject for me, something I’d like to become more proficient in to consider myself a more complete DJ.

My question is, what does the future of DJing hold? There are many new control methods becoming available which have no physical controls as such, like the iPad and of course the SCS system (did anyone see that 42" transparent touch screen traktor controller omgfmlabp!?!?!?!?!?! :stuck_out_tongue:), will physical buttons and faders fade into the past with VCR and 1/4" tape reels to be replaced by touch screens and whatever else?

Is it just because we’ve been brought up without things like the iPad that we often prefer something more solid? After all, midi itself has been around since 1982, when the nearest thing to a Macbook Pro was this baby:


(Which, by the way, cost $7,800 and came with an OS called ‘SOS’ which apparently was HORRIBLY unstable…)

Will future generations of DJs use something completely different and radical? Will we be the old guys complaining and saying yeh, but it’s just not the same feeling you get with a button…

Go wild on this one, I want to see if we can be as accurate as this… aluminium clothing and a phone/radio that you take with you everywhere! :smiley:

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What Ipad? So last week!:smiley:

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Physical controls will ALWAYS have their place. But touch controls will become popular as well. You will always have idiots out there that don’t think things through and jump off half cocked when you bring up the subject of touch control, like their mere existence will somehow stop them from using knobs, buttons, or faders. That’s NOT how it’s going to happen.

It’s going to play out like this. Physical and touch controls will be used for the things they excel at. If there is a function that NEEDS tactile feedback, that function will most often be mapped to a physical control. A good example of this are the PLAY and CUE buttons. Touch controls will most often be used when tactile feedback isn’t necessary (like scrolling through a library or track, selecting effects or control values, etc - basically anything you’d be comfortable using a mouse now for). They’ll also be used on surfaces with high modality. If you have a small control surface where physical controls would be difficult to place, or if the entire surface needs to be reconfigured often, touch will be used here.

Of course, there will always be people who like playing around with control styles, and manufacturers that try to switch things up (for a number of reasons). But generally you’ll always see this basic rule in action. I don’t think fully touch surfaces are the future, any more than fully tactile surfaces are. We’re going to start seeing a lot of both.

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Insert a scene from Minority Report here.. I can see the day when a DJ is more like a composer up on stage with a wand controlling the music.

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The company that invented the Minority Report UI idea are called “OOOii” (http://www.ooo-ii.com) and specialize in fantasy user interfaces for movies and movie sets. They used to fake UIs as post production FX but are more and more getting into live UIs on projection screens and built into sets so that actors can interact with them more realistically.

They admit that the main problem with Minority Report style UIs are that your arms get very tired. We had the same experience doing these kinds of video-based interactions using the Playstation Eye at SCEA R&D back when I worked there. Projection onto a flat surface like a huge touchscreen is a more realistic goal, although the Cyberpunk “twitch interface” idea where tiny micro movements are detected and interpreted by your personal computer (i.e. phone) is more where I see it going. Minimal motion to get total control.

Nope, buttons and knobs are here to stay, they offer an interface you don’t need to be looking at and touching (two interactrion modes at once) to use, in fact you can use them with your eyes closed with a little practice.

We just need companies to stop using the cheapest 6mm Micro Tactile they can source for every damn control…

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i feel like a while ago, i saw some video where some edm artist was acting like he was controlling/making music by waving around a wii controller or something like it. kinda goofy, and turned out to be a hoax.

the dude was just waving this thing to the beat of the music. nice joke, right?

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You only have to look at the myriad of Microsoft Kinect hacks to know that a true virtualized mixing environment isn’t a huge distance off. With a group of savvy developers Traktor could be made to work today…

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the future is clearly both tactile AND touchscreen control… the sooner companys like Apple realise this, the better.

its Steve Jobs’ stubborness that’s preventing the iOS from becoming a serious gaming platform… and no, Angry Birds doesn’t count as ‘serious’. Let’s see some proper control pads that work at an OS level!!

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[quote]Deadmau5 uses a lemur (i think thats what its called) to control his effects. It’s already seeing commercial use for DJing.
[/quote]

You missed the boat already they are discontinued since Jan and the company shut down. http://www.jazzmutant.com/

I really feel for creating or mixing music you NEED the feeling of physical contact with the control surface, at least for playing live, be that faders, buttons or knobs.

Maybe its just me but I dont like to have to think too much about what page a controller is set at… or what might happen IF. Instant visual and physical reference is just my way of doing things. Hell I HATE soft-takover though, the midi4loop looks just the toy for me :smiley:

For studio work touch screens are bloody brilliant given the flexibility of the multiple devices you can control from one screen for the price.

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meh, this touch control thing is overhyped atm. e.g., a mixer section on an ipad? with no tactile feedback at all? idk, i can only say i wouldn’t want a touch screen in the center of my DJ setup.

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Good thing you didn’t bother reading the thread! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Simple answer: Eventually it will be touchscreen and after that gestures and after that maybe mind controlling music production on the fly :eek:, after all we made it to the moon right?

Just like old Dj’s used vinyl and beatmatched, we use controllers and a sync button. What is happening today is that the jogwheel is becoming extinct. I have an S4 and I rarely use it. There’s this article Will You Be DJing With Jogwheels In 5 Years? Ritchie Hawtin Won’t… that poses the same question and explains how jogwheels take too much real state on the mixing surface and how they were moved to the back of the Traktor S4.

Classic DJ’s will need the tactile feel but younger DJ’s will grow up in this touchscreen environment and will not miss knobs since they never used them in the first place. They will have old farts like us telling them how touchscreen is a fucking joke and that they are not real DJ’s just the way we get barked at from old Vinyl/CDJ DJ’s for using MIDI controllers. The detail here is that technology is changing too fast and we have all these new technologies being thrown at us at the same time.

Also let’s take into consideration that touchscreen has proven to be a success and inevitably they will become cheaper and larger the way an HDTV was $2k for a 42" couple years ago and now you can have them for $400. Just like the MP3 killed the Vinyl and the CD, touchscreen will kill the physical knob and the fader. Take this into consideration: Just like the S4 is a physical device that came in 2010, compared to a VCI-100 that came in 2007(?), the S4 has more features than the VCI obviously, then I can assure you that by 2013 (even sooner because of company competition) there will be an even better and more featured controller that will make the S4 look outdated. Maybe by then, bigger touchscreen devices will be available and new controllers will inevitably be created for such devices allowing for:

  1. cheaper production - just an application, no physical media to be manufactured
  2. approachability - All you need is the touchscreen surface and pretty much you will not need anything else. No space for one-trick-pony devices like the S4, CDJ’s etc. You would use the device to watch movies, do your taxes and DJ. This will appeal to an even bigger audience in a future where space will be less and less (not mentioning more expensive) thanks to a growing global population. See Ipad.
  3. users will get the new interface/GUI faster. Just a download and you will get the new Traktor Touch or whatever.

Conclusion: Touchscreen is the future. Apple changed the game. Thats why every other company is following and releasing a touchscreen device. They are still small but they will get bigger. Just like Microsoft Surface, they will become the future coffee table that just happens to have an app to make it a 8 channel setup with FX, Ableton-like production capabilities that create lossless better-than-vinyl sounding tracks of 500MB each since also storage tech will also evolve the way 6 years ago a PC had 40GB of space and you thought you would never fill that and now 500GB is barely enough.

What is going to be great is the creativeness of how people will do things. When you have a controller and you sell it, it dont cease to exist, it gets handed to someone who will maybe use it better than you in a more creative way. Maybe that device will again be resold to someone that doesnt have the money but have the time to make it into a greater thing. That person may torrent all the necessary apps and will connect a bunch of old MIDI equipment to create the next big thing. Just check out Joachim Garraud who uses an old Roland keytar thru MIDI.

My crystal ball now is exhausted and needs moon beams to recharge. :stuck_out_tongue:

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haha, thanks nemonic. I’m not looking for what people don’t like about touch screens, that’s already been covered in threads solely about things like touchOSC, more just what else could replace what we currently use. mind controlled DJing?! I dno!

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This was made by some guy

DARPA has worked on this for several years with fucking bright scientists and millions of dollars. Even the internet was created by DARPA and now we use it just like that!:eek:

Ok now Ill shut up since big brother is watching and the Illuminati and the aliens and the UFO’s!!! :eek::eek::eek:

runs and hides under the bed wearing a tin foil hat

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that’s quite disturbing…

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Oh nice, it gets worse. How about giant mind controlled robotic flying beetles?

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I just dont see touchscreens being around to much longer. I mean they been around since the 80s its really old technology and your limited by the screen space! In this video he shows how he made any surface around you the screen, any object the controller.
We had an article about being a good dancer and Djing, this will be taken to new heights with this technology and the interface will be the fucking Dancefloor!
Talk about interacting with the crowd! If your arms get tired use your effing legs and all other unnamed appendages.:smiley: Physical controls will be just that
Get Physical!
Parnav Mistry The sixth sense

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Armadillos have better blocking properties

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WTF, dude? of course i read the thread before posting. my post was on-topic. it was suggested ITT that touch screens are the future. i argued against that by noting that touch screens totally lack tactile feedback which makes it undesirable to have them at the heart of a DJ setup. touch screens tend to work better when used for consumption as opposed to production.

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The problem with “air interfaces” is that there’s no definition of controls. You know where to put your hand to actuate a function. And because of that, you can easily do things like actuate more than one control at the same time. Minority Report style interfaces are fine when you are only manipulating one thing at a time, but simultaneously manipulating multiple functions is a mess. Playing a piano is as good an example as any - it just doesn’t work with air gesturing.

There are also problems with things like reference. If you have your virtual air DJ setup, does it move with you? Does the spacial relationship between the virtual devices remain the same, or can they change? What if you’re in a small booth? Where’s your point of reference?

Again, all of these different interfaces will coexist and will be used where they’re most appropriate and effective. There won’t be a single interface everyone uses, because there isn’t a single interface that’s good at everything.

Calm down, Francis. I’m just referring to the fact that most of the posts in the thread acknowledge the fact that multiple interfaces are the way forward. But let me ask you some questions. First of all, if a DJ setup in the future were touch based, why would it be an iPad - or like an iPad? The iPad isn’t a DJ product. What if Pioneer or Denon made a DJ centric touchscreen?

Also, why do you assume that future touchscreens won’t have tactile feedback? Haptic technologies are already being developed, and it’s highly likely that future touch displays will have haptic feedback. Of course, I don’t imagine this will get us big twisty knobs popping up from nowhere on a touchscreen, but it would certainly be possible to feel distinct faders, what their values were, the location and value of EQs, etc.

Of course, if you to combine this kind of technology with something like Vistonics, you combine touch and tactile control to great effect.

Vistonics