Presonus faderport - or any other good alternatives?

Denalihighway

Hi lads

I'm a child of the DAW and VSTs. There's no escaping that.

However, there are still ways of old (as such) like using faders etc and avoiding obsessing about what's happening on screen etc that still seem to make so much sense.

With this in mind I was looking into something like the Presonus Faderport to try to use my ears as much as possible and avoid the mouse/screen thing when I can.

Is this a reasonably good option or are there other things around the same money worth looking at? It would be about how much I'm willing to spend. (€149 on a certain monster German distributor).

I'm not planning on going the external mixer route.

Thanks gents.

pinksoir

I had the Behringer BCF2000, but I sold it. It was alright and had motorized faders etc. Plus there is much more options for control of VSTs etc with the extra knobs. However, I found it a bit too confusing/prohibitive to use as there was a little bit of menu diving required for certain things, and the way it was laid out in Mackie emulation mode didn't correspond with the labelling on the unit. So basically you have to remember (or label) all the buttons.

Also, the way it operates in groups of eight channels means you must have a multiple of eight channels going in your DAW in order to be able to page up and down properly. For example, if you have 10 channels going, on page one you'll have channels 1-8, but on page two you'll have channels 3-10. It becomes confusing when you expect the first two channels on page two to be 9 and 10, but in fact they are 3 and 4, and 9 and 10 are the last two! It gets even more confusing when you add more channels/groups/fx into the mix.

Furthermore, while I found the encoders to be good, I found the faders to be not so great. Though what do you expect for the price? That being said, for a similar (cheaper even) price of the Faderport you get a lot more overall control. However, if it was me I'd go for the Faderport. I like that it takes up less desk space and it seems a lot more intuitive to use. Plus skipping through channels isn't such a big deal, or even selecting them with the mouse. Plus, not that I've used one, but the single fader looks to be of good quality and that's what you want really. I plan to buy one soon enough anyways.

I don't really know of any other options in a similar price range. I'm sure you know once you go up a few hundred (or thousand!) quid there's a lot more options.

Denalihighway

Ta Pinksoir, appreciate that.

anyone else have experience with other controller hardware?

there's also this for VST plugins - Novation Nocturn

shayleon

I use alpha track frontier and love it

I also have the nocturn but found it completely useless and buggy and it's collecting dust.