I don’t get it. You get 16 MIDi-assignable knobs, why not just assign 6 of those to EQ?
They’re not in the right place to make sense to me, and that negates using them for effects at the same time.
It’s a personal problem…I don’t like pages.
I totally understand the organizational/spacial perspective. I’m the same way actually. I think my acceptance of layers/pages has more to do with wanting EVERYTHING, but not being willing to shell out the dough for that many physical controls. I look at it kind of like a puzzle. How can I get the most functionality out of a couple pieces of gear, while keeping things simple and intuitive. I’ve found that everything + the kitchen sink is not always all that. Sometimes it’s better to have a simple mapping with just the essentials. As for the placement of the APC knobs though, honestly you get used to it in no time. For a simple 2 deck setup, I’d recommend the top 2 rows control gain and eqs (1 deck per row), and the bottom two rows can control fx units 1 and 2. Everything’s always in the same place, no layers. Works out pretty well.
But why would you make a simple 2-deck setup in Ableton?
I understand the appeal of DJing with it and not doing live production, believe me…that’s what I’ve wanted to do with it since I saw BT and Sasha start performing with it around 2004, but just a basic setup with 2 decks seems odd…and the APCs seem really badly suited to expanding unless you’re using dummy clips.
Yeah, two decks I was thinking for your average Traktor user. For Ableton alone, I am actually very comfortable with the handshake/standard layout. It’s all about the racks, so any track you select has all the relevant controls right at your fingertips. But like i said, bomes can help get you into a whole 'nother world of flexibility, with cool hybrids of multi-banking and user-defined control. I like the vcm-600 a lot, and actually considered it before I bought the APC. (I was basically just in the market for 4 more faders, but ended up with a bit more, lol!) I just decided in the end that I could do with more buttons, and the 600 was a bit out of my price range. And after seeing what people could do with the Monome, I got set on the idea of building my own step sequencer in Live. Damn, now ALL the buttons on my APC do something, and I still don’t have enough. Oh well. Build my own or get a monome 64, I guess.
That’s a legitimate argument, but I–obviously–don’t like the rack control paradigm they’ve developed. I actually have my “effects” section (similar to the way it works on the APC) locked to a rack that doesn’t do anything and the midi control codes mapped to something useful.
For me, the assignment isn’t flexible enough. If you could make a rack that you could map controls from anywhere to, it would work better…but that would be analogous to pages that don’t work as well as just having more controls.
I will say that the VMC is lacking on endless encoders (i’d kinda like a few) as well as obvious clip controls…things like looping, clip start/end, scrubbing, transpose, gain…many of them only make sense on endless encoders, and because they have to follow selection, it only makes sense to have them in a section by themselves somewhere. It doesn’t bother me that much, but it’s one of the reasons that makes me think that we’re all going to look back at these belated but early attempts as failures.