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Touch sensitive motorized faders for expression/modulation?

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Chickenpickin

New Member
Hi, joined a year or so ago but I think this is my first real post. I’m a hobbyist with diverse musical taste. I’ve recently decided to try my hand at orchestral composition and programming. As such, I find myself in need of a decent set of faders. I’ve looked at the sparrow and the nanokontrol as low cost options, but I keep wondering if I should finally get a touch sensitive motorized fader bank (like the behringer x-touch compact or the icon platform m+). My thinking is that the flying faders and touch sensitive encoders would be useful for mixing and sound design. However, in my YouTube research, I don’t see many (any?) people using motorized faders for expression. Is there a reason for this???? Does anyone have head-to-head experience with the behringer or icon devices? ( I’m leaning towards the behringer for the multitude of touch encoders.)

Thanks in advance,
David
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In a nutshell, faders send MIDI to your DAW, but your DAW does not send MIDI to your faders. Therefore, motorised faders do not move automatically in MIDI mode as they don't have a way of reading what your MIDI data is doing.
Thus, motorised faders are generally useless for MIDI automation, but they do have benefits for other automation.

I quite like the X-touch compact for both purposes, except the last time I used one (2021?) You had to power the unit off then on again in order to switch between MIDI or DAW mode.
Even without the motorised feedback, the faders still felt great, and you can trigger MIDI value presets on the unit itself if you want the faders to fly to specific values.
I often set up two buttons for each fader, one button to set the fader to 127, another to set it to 100, depending on what I found useful for the particular CC number.
 
AFAIK, it is still only the EUCON protocol that supports this, which gives only two hardware options of the old Artist Mix or the new S1. Even more bizarre, Cubase is still the only DAW that supports this mode via their Quick Controls.

In Cubase you can set any Quick Control to be any midi cc, and pressing and holding the Aux button on the control surface puts the desk into the right mode. Note - there is currently a bug even there where the desk forgets its mode every time you change channel, so you have to re-enter it manually every time. Avid are aware of this and have promised a fix in the next EuControl release.

It's been over a decade since I pointed out that that the EuCon and Cubase combo is the only game in town to touch automate all midi controllers. Boggles my mind.
 
I use a Monogram CC 3 Fader unit to write Expression & Dynamics (and Vibrato sometimes). But of course it isn't motorised. The main thing lacking is the ability for the faders to "remember" the CC values. But, I've concluded the same as others above that it just can't be done.
 
Keith Cocker said:
I use a Monogram CC 3 Fader unit to write Expression & Dynamics (and Vibrato sometimes). But of course it isn't motorised. The main thing lacking is the ability for the faders to "remember" the CC values. But, I've concluded the same as others above that it just can't be done.
Click to expand...
These are non-motorized, but they do remember up to 16 sets of CC and MIDI channels.

Full disclosure: I make these :)

Fader Micro Premium
 
Chickenpickin said:
Does anyone have head-to-head experience with the behringer or icon devices? ( I’m leaning towards the behringer for the multitude of touch encoders.)

Thanks in advance,
David
Click to expand...
I use the Icon Platform X for midi CC and it works great! Depending on which DAW you use, you can get midi CC feedback to the motorized faders. I use Reaper and the reaticulate script provides the feedback.
 
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I just stumbled across this gem:
Nuances Controller
I saw them in the Crow Hill videos on YT and was hooked immediately.

Maybe a bit OT as these are not motorized or touch sensitive, but I think they´re a good solution to handle three MIDI CCs at once.

Unfortunately these are only coming in small batches every month.
Luckily I was able to order one from the last batch last monday.
 
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