and replacing it with 1 or 2 nanopads along side my dicers
OR
another pair of dicers.
wanna do something along the lines of the midi fighter mapping ean made a few months back, plus just getting a bit, well, tired of my old vci now.
very aware of the dodgyness of nanopads, but i just can’t resist the touch pad.
thinking the 4 dicer option would have a nice, compact, very mobile thing to it, but need something like an x/y for ‘better’ effects control. if i get another dicer set, that’s one per deck. if i wanna go nanopad i’d need 2 (plus a million back ups) one for a and one for b, with dicers on c and d. so dicer def seem cheaper option… just wanna try something new.
figured page one can deal with cues and play/stop, page 2 loop and page 3 effects, with a total of 30 buttons (including shifts) on each dicer this should be doable…
Still in 1.2 FW, always used my own maps so never bothered with updating it, lol.
Looked at other controllers. Problem is I know what I wanna do, but a lot if the ‘vci clones’ shall we say, have layouts specific to the flow they designed for. Which turns custom maps (or mine) into a mess of modifiers. Which is where something like nano/lpd/dicer gains an advantage.
each individual dicer has a total of 30 buttons (5 for each layer, and when you hold the layer button it activates ANOTHER layer. so (53)+(53)=30)
so with one pair of dicers you get 60 buttons
no with two pairs you get 120 buttons. im sure on pair would be sufficient for 4 deck control (it is for me) and the other pair would have tons of one button effects
id suggest upgrading the firmware for sure. it will give your VCI new life… if your old school and have been mixing on TT’s and or CDJ’s beforehand, you might find you will start to miss your jog wheels aswell.
My Turntables and timecodes are sitting under the bed, due to a lack of space for setting them up here in my new place… And was using NI maschine with my own custom mapping for mixing in traktor. Its great, and has heaps of functionality, but boy did miss having the jog wheels…
i used to have a VCI a while back and sold it, but i missed it too much so i reordered a VCI arcade recently. it feels so much better/natural with jog wheels again. Even for Fader FX, ive made a simmilar mapping to eans, with a few noticable differences but the concept is the same, and it just feels so right using the jogs to control the FX rather than twiddling a little knob.
now, adding a controller to the setup is allways a bonus, but i wouldnt hang up the VCI personally, not just yet anyways. At the moment im using VCI arcade + NI maschine and ive never been happier with my setup.
give it a go though, see if you like it, but i guarantee you will miss having a more “traditional” control surface. if your mixing internally aswell, you gotta think about stuff like EQ, Line Faders and Xfader… how u gonna map those to Dicers… When i was using JUST maschine, it had rotary pots which i assigned to those… but still, just wasnt the same, especially the crossfader/line faders.
I would go all out man and just get the djtt overlay etc too… and while you’re at it, do the arcade mod too, that makes a massive massive difference!!!
I pulled all the info together on how to do the mod, without going to the machine shop too.
I know cost is most likely an issue, but these are the first couple questions that came to my mind when reading your post / follow-up.
Have you thought about a MIDI Fighter added to your setup? I know they don’t have X-Y support, but would probably be fairly clutch for a lot of cue mapping. And it sticks with the whole VCI theme.
Or have you thought about the Maschine at all? I know it’s even more of a price jump, but it has a lot more buttons and great pads. Add on top of that great software to go along with it, it really is an amazing package for what it is. If you’re into production at all, or want to be, I’d seriously give a second thought about how to modify a Maschine into your Traktor setup.
+1 on the maschine thing… plus it has full bright LED feedback, great for club booths… and the controler editor helps alot aswel for complex mappings… you can set pages/layers within the controller manager, and if you really wanted to, set even more “layers” with modifiers in traktor, so like have… layers within layers… to make an epic sandwich of MIDI goodness… plus maschine has the rotaries, the dual screens which you can set to display the values of the rotaries with little meter thingies… and a whole bunch of extra buttons aside from the pads which you can assign to… whatever… its really quite awesomely good. bit of a price hike though…
oh yeah… and the production software that comes with it is nothing short of awesome… great to make loops on even for using in traktor… but id reccomend using it as a plugin within a proper DAW to get better mixdown capabilities if your making a full track…
