pads or arcade buttons, which do you prefer?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

pads or arcade buttons, which do you prefer?

I have never used aracade buttons for launching sounds, only at real aracade machines years ago…

Do you think those are more acurate than pads for a dj?

Of course in a dj environment you don’t need velocity… but what about the feel?

2

I personally like pads because you don’t have the travel time you would in arcade buttons. But goddamn are those little clicky buttons fun to press.

3

Arcade buttons have superior haptic feedback and they are reallllly fun to play.

Pads have crappy haptic feedback but they can be velocity sensitive.

I dont really like one over the other to be honest, arcade buttons are better for some things (anything that doesnt require velocity sensitivity) while pads are better for other things (anything that requires velocity sensitivity).

Some day someone smart will make velocity sensitive arcade buttons, that will be the day i cream my pants.

4

lol :smiley:

I’ll have to try those arcade buttond

5

Don’t need velocity, but could be used similar to a drum pad setup where your hotcues actually take on the volume of the velocity, which could lead to some interesting possibilities.

6

Yeah… but afaik traktor doesn’t understand velocity messages. Or any other dj software that I know.

7

Lots of midi programs do, if you to use them with Traktor you will need to run a program like Bomes to turn them into a usable midi message.

8

They exist, mike was thinking about using them afaik, but they were too bulky and have a limited amount of cycles before they fuck out… else I’ve smoked too much crack and am making all this up.

9

So I could transform veolocity into a cc message?

That is cool.

10

The Akai LPD 8 can do this by default. It either sends regular Note messages or CC messages that take the velocity into account.

I wouldn’t say pads have “crappy” haptic feedback. Ok, the ones on the nano are a bit too stiff for my taste. But I love pad mashing on the Maschine. It comes down to personal preference, I guess.
It’s also a supply-related thing. There are lots of different pad controllers around. But no arcade button controllers except for that piece of vaporware we keep hearing about.

11

Yup, then make that do something like move the volume fader in Traktor Pro so you can trigger cue points kinda like on a sampler with full velocity sensitivity :slight_smile:’

Or an effect… or anything you damn well please :smiley: