Thursday 25 September 2008

HEAD HURTS

The main problem with using software is that you loose the tactile control over the parameters of synths and obviously a mixing desk. With a mouse you can only control one element at a time and the arrangements and mixes on the new album are far more complex than the last. Some songs have up to 50 tracks each with EQ, Compression & plug-ins for the actual synths so controlling everything gets very tedious.

So I decided to invest in a new tool for mixing and general control of the various bits of software I use. There are quite a few control surfaces out there but I chose the Euphonix MC Control. The beauty of this device over others is the flexibility you have of assigning it's faders and knobs to anything, it also has a cool touch screen which can be configured to control anything within the software.

Although it only has 4 main faders you can bank through a project, you can also assign a group of tracks to one fader which is really useful. Needless to say I've spent most of this evening buried in the user manual, it's a really powerful control surface but hopefully it's gonna help with mixing the new album.

8 comments:

Gary said...

Hi Matt

Just been looking up info on this piece of kit and it looks superb, price wise well out of my league but I'm sure with the experience you have you will get the most out of it.

Gary

Northern Kind said...

Yeah it was pricey, especially for something that doesn't add anything sonically but It's nice to have some knobs to twiddle.

Had a few questions for the podcast regarding our equipment set-up so if we have time I will be doing a quick overview of my studio... just for the geeks :-)

Gary said...

Hi Matt

I would certainly be interested to hear about your studio set-up that is for sure.

Gary

Anonymous said...

Euphonix MC Control is a very nice bit of gear, shame it's only for Mac OS X.

Anonymous said...

Hi Matt,

You may already know, but I thought I'd point it out if not.

Did you know your album is being bootlegged in Russia?

Northern Kind said...

I think there are plans for it to work with PCs, I can't see why not as EuCon already works with PCs. It is very nice now I've got used to it.

Yeah I am aware of the bootlegged version, there isn't really much we can do about it, I'd refer it to our legal team... if we had one :-)

I guess it's a compliment.

Anonymous said...

I've just invested in the Mackie Control Universal Pro + Extender Pro + Control C4 Pro.

Northern Kind said...

The Mackie was my first and obvious choice when I started looking at control surfaces, I used a massive Euphonix console in the early nineties that was pretty impressive so I had heard of Euphonix, it was a nice surprise to see they had entered into the lower end of the market, the review of the MC Mix in SOS was quite good but it looked a little sparse for it's cost, the MC Control gives me all the features I really wanted plus you can expand it with the MC Mix similar to Mackie.

I think what swung it was the connectivity using ethernet, rather than FW, USB or MIDI plus the control over third party plug-ins which I find really useful now I figured out how to use it.