DAW Control Surfaces (Flying Faders)

[per-anders]

I'm looking for a nice small DAW control surface with motorized faders to work with Reason. It seems like no-one talks about these things here, is there a problem with Reason and MCU or any other protocol?

From my research three contenders come up again and again (though not specific to Reason) the Behringer X-Touch, the new Presonus Faderport 8 and the Icon Icon Qcon Pro-X.

Does anyone have any experience of using these with Reason?

[joeyluck]

There's a few threads here about them.

The X-Touch Compact is great if you don't need all the extra control of the regular X-Touch. Think of it like a BCF2000 with much better faders and more/better knobs.

The Faderport 8 seems good if you don't need knobs. Not sure why they excluded knobs...

[per-anders]

Hey thanks! Does Reason integrate well with the X-Touch? I mean does it make use of all the controls, or is there a lot of stuff that doesn't map, and if so can you remap it manually if that happens?

[EnochLight]

I bought the full sized X-Touch when it released and ended up returning it. While it works OK with Reason (via standard Mackie Control stuff), it wasn't fully supported. The scribble strips won't work with Reason, and the X-Touch's clip LED's get stuck on if you ever run your audio signal too hot and clip, and they can't be shut off without manually power-cycling the X-Touch. Also, the transport info read kind of weird. It worked as expected with Studio One, but with Reason it wouldn't display right. Also, the jog wheel felt down right cheap - like way too loose!

Ultimately, I felt the almost $600 price tag couldn't be justified and returned it.

That said, the motorized faders were pretty quality (same ones used in their several thousand dollar X32 - they're made in-house). I'd consider the X-Touch Compact just for the motorized faders, perhaps. I can't recommend the regular X-Touch, though.

[per-anders]

Ah, wow, OK that's really good to know. Definitely scares me off the X-Touch. The QCon looks great and claims to have Reason support, but I keep hearing worrying things about Icon's build quality and it's huuuge. The Presonus isn't out yet, I like that it's a smaller unit but it also seems to lack a lot of features for the price, and I keep hearing bad things about their support, which doesn't bode well in the long run on a $500 piece of kit.

Maybe I should attempt to roll my own with an Arduino and some parts... makes me wish that the Props would think about making one.

[KeithJames]

Hi, joined this forum for this very reason. Any update on this? Looking a good control surface with motorised faders for Reason 8.

[per-anders]

I'm looking into the FaderPort 8 at the moment. If I get it I will report back on my findings.

The trouble is that if Reason doesn't work well with MCU protocol then because it's a niche sort of product (even if it does seem to be coming into it's own at the moment in the home market), chances are that the Prop's aren't going to know what sort of demand is out there for it. To make matters worse all the units come with software of their own which makes it easy for people to migrate away if they want to use their controllers rather than clamoring for support for functionality within Reason like they should be doing. It doesn't help that this is as close to an official forum as there is and even this isn't an official Properllerheads site, so anything said here is pretty much a whisper to the wind.

All in all I'm not feeling confident about the future of Reason and these controllers. But I'd love to be proven wrong because I really do love Reason and i'm pretty heavily invested into it now.

[EnochLight]

IMHO, using the MCU protocol is the worst choice with Reason. Nektar Tech have already shown that you can offer fantastic - superior - control by utilizing their own drivers and software templates. If only there was a "Panorama P-1 Pro" or something that had all motorized faders, a jog wheel, etc - essentially their take on the Xtouch/Mackie Control/etc. Eh... we can dream...

[per-anders]

Alrighty, so today I received the Faderport 8.

Initial setup takes a bit of work with Reason and I'm going to be sending the props some feedback based on my own experience as well as my research so who knows, things could get smoother in the future.

Anyhow, this thing is up and running now and is just great, I need to preface how much I love this unit before I start because I'm going to be getting intot he nitty gritty of what's not right here and it could make ti seem like that's the whole picture, it isn't. It's just the details that should be fixed by either the Props or Presonus or both in different cases. So don't get the wrong impression that this is just a whinge, or that the products aren't good, that's not the case at all. It's just that this is the info I wish I'd had before and that I hope the Props and Presonus can use to improve their products.

So to start out the faders feel smooth although they're not the quietest I've encountered, but you shouldn't notice them once you're going. The unit appears to be solidly built and it's nice to have soft button that don't make noise for the transport controls.

One area that Presonus could do well with improving in a future version is simply angling the displays, they've been optimized to have maximum contrast if you're looking at them from the bottom left ( so good for right handed people), but they lose contrast super fast as you move away from this angle. It's easy to prop the unit up but that loses the nice low profile ergonomics of the unit as a whole.

Another downside is the rotaries. There are only two on this and both offer a stiff click. Personally I'm more of a fan of smoothrotaries with a soft click if any at all for the tasks these are going to be doing. Together with the hard plastic on both it makes using them like rubbing your fingertips with sandpaper and not at all a premium experience.

Now onto it's interaction with Reason.

Reason offers some pretty decent methods of customizing the interaction with the control surface via "Overrides" which is just as well because out of the box you're going to need to make some adjustments. Reason see's the "Loop" button as "End" and the "Click" button as "Loop" for a start. In addition Reason's default behavior is to follow the user around the interface with the control surface controlling every single gadget in the program. Most likely this isn't the behavior you want from your mixer so you can lock it to the "Master Section" using the "Surface Locking" entry in the "Options" menu. Then before you go further chances are that you will want to override the master out to the 8th Fader. Having done all that (and maybe a few other tweaks) you will come ot the problem that Reason doesn't seem to offer a way to save/export your control overrides as part of the preferences. So you will have to save a project and set it up as your default template. Not a big deal, just not as clean as it could be.

Reason has these problems with every controller out there it seems, so this is a problem at the Props end, not the hardware manufacturors.

So what other quirks are there? Well Reason lacks even basic Read/Write on it's Faders, instead automation is achieved by manually adding tracks to each control you want to automate and recording them, hoping that you' haven't accidentally armed something you didn't mean to and knowing that you must overwrite existing data. This means that the controls on the Faderport for Read/Write/Latch/Touch/Trim/Off are basically redundant in the package. This is a shame as it makes the whole process of automating faders a lot less intuitive and fast than it is elsewhere (Studio One, Logic, Protools, Abeltone Live, Reaper... etc). This would be the first thing that the Prop's should fix going forward towards a world where control surfaces are quickly becoming the norm even in home studios. Ideally they should respect the "touch fader" input if available, otherwise just delta CC values coming in.

The next things could be problems either at Presonus end or the Props, either way lets fix it boys.

The Presonus offers select buttons that can also be used to arm tracks via the arm button. This does not work in Reason. Instead in "ARM" mode the select buttons turn on/off boolean checkbox buttons such as LPF/HPF on off... but never it seems the track record arming... deeply frustrating.

The selection buttons also seem to be tied into some menu system for the mixer panels. Potentially interesting, but it would be much more useful if they literally just elected the track, especially as the single Pen/Param controller that the Presonus offers (unlike in most of it's competitors) can apparently only adjust the left most track.

Now the Presonus offers a set of modes to the top right of the faders for track, pan, sends etc that wll assing those values directly to the faders for quick adjustement to get around the lack of per track rotaries. This works wonderfully... right up until you bank/move the active track from the left most one. As soon as you do the value is not translated correctly to the fader before reading the value out. This means that when you switch to Pan mode the tracks volume is assigned to the pan, when you switch back the pan value is assigned to the volume... not a good situation. When the banking is fully to the left most track everything works just fine and switching between modes results int he faders moving to their correct position instead of sitting there and just overwriting the values in reason. This could be either a Propellerheads or a Presonus problem. Either way it's their issue to sort out, because right now it's a "my" problem.

Additionally it's hard to switch back to the "Track" mode, you can't ismply select it in Reason, instead you must select the "All" button at the bottom of the panel.

Other features that really should be fixed. This I suspect is on the Presonus side, but I'd like to see track meters showing up in Reason not just in Studio One (I have yet to try it in elsewhere to check how things work with other apps). Zoom doesn't work on the Reason side.

There will be more things of course, more stuff that could and should be better. I hope that this stuff is useful to someone out there who's thinking of grabbing the Faderport 8, or any desktop mixer to work with Reason. It might sound like a pretty rough deal right now but if you were to look at it from the perspective of the most critical needs from this sort of unit i.e. real tactile flying faders, transport control, then it's actually doing a great job. You will not be using your mouse and keyboard anywhere near as much during mixing, it's a significant step up, but there are still some teething troubles to be sorted out.

[joeyluck]

Out of curiosity, what made you choose the Faderport over something like the BCF-2000 or the X-Touch Compact?
It sounds like someone just needs to create a Remote map for it...

[per-anders]

Out of curiosity, what made you choose the Faderport over something like the BCF-2000 or the X-Touch Compact?
It sounds like someone just needs to create a Remote map for it...

It came down to gut feeling, research reading feedback people had given eith their own experiences and my own needs.

Behringer - It's a brand with some baggage. I know they're putting out some much nicer kit these days and trust me I'm salivating over that new synth of theirs, but they seem to have a track record of putting out equipment that they then only give the bare minimum of support, maybe a couple of updates and that's it, well before the product is as bug free as it needs to be (and ignoring changes to environment such as OS updates that could screw old drivers etc). The X-Touch looks amazing, but I kept hearing how people weren't getting the support they needed and how people who were using Reason were just giving up on the unit.

The Faderport is the newest kid on the block and that's always interesting.

It seemed like a simpler option as a DAW controller, parred down to just the things that I want/need, but a little more info than the X-Touch compact (notably scribble strips/UI & transport controls), but $100 cheaper than the full X-Touch.

It also gave me Studio One in the bundle which gives me another option on Windows and a guaranteed oiption to work with this workflow in case Reason was a complete fail.

It's a small form factor mixer, this thing is only the size of an LP and it's a relatively low profile which makes it ergonomically friendly.

The single fader Faderport got massive amounts of love out there, no reason to imagine that this would be any different.

I'll be honest, none of the options out there are perfect. If i had the time to roll my own with an Arduino and R-Pi I probably would, but it would take time because while I could code the backend in no time at all I'm an elecronics neophite and getting together the components in the chasis I wanted would take me an age. The Pressonus is good though and fits my needs at least better than the other options. I may still suggest to Presonus that they offer a prism or mirror block cover for the scribble strips along with an invert display command to overcome the angling issues.

[per-anders]

Just to add, what it needs on the Reason side is :

A good remote map.

Support for Read, Write, Latch and Touch Mixer modes.

Support for Track Arming in the mixer.

Better handling of Overrides (it should allow override to just one "mode" of the controller, right now if you override the master volume for instance when you go into the sub sections of the mixer the scribble strip says that fader will control something else, but it never does. The display and the corresponding controller should always match).

Support for track level output.

Support for Zoom option.

Support for "select" behavior.

Bugfix for when a target track is set to anything other than the left most one the values being overwritten when changing fader modes (could be either company).

Better handling of dynamic mapping i.e. how overrides happen together with banking.

Generally a more consistent support for MCU that matches what all the controllers themselves see the messages as being (i.e. no more Click = Loop bugs).

It would be really nice if Reason offered a mode that was more geared around transport and the mixer and didn't try to be a shoehorned super dynamic "we can make it work with every rack extension" (only not quite as good as a dedicated programmed layout) approach. This thing could be epic with Reason, and no other DAW inspires me as much as Reason does.

[sonicbyte]

Hi, a little late response, but you should all check this new product from ICON, the Platform M

Looks promising and not as expensive as the Qcon
http://iconproaudio.com/product/platform-m/

Regards

[EnochLight]

Hi, a little late response, but you should all check this new product from ICON, the Platform M

Looks promising and not as expensive as the Qcon
http://iconproaudio.com/product/platform-m/

Regards

Motorized faders appear to be pretty bad on the Icon Platform M (and likely their Pro line). They're not ALPS, and the videos I've seen of them always show them jerking and jumping as they move. I mean, I get that it's a (somewhat) affordable control surface - they sell for $349 USD here - but man... those faders..

[per-anders]

The Platform M looks really cool to me but the Presonus seemed to be a little more sturdy, I liked the control clustering, and as EnochLight mentioned the ALPS faders were a definite draw.

[sonicbyte]

Is the new Presonus faderport 8 working well with reason ? Remember the original faderport never work natively with Reason

[per-anders]

Hi, my previous posts explain exactly how well it's working in Reason.

In summation - It works because it supports MCU, for basics this is fine, but Reason's support of MCU is a little funky. Both sides have some odd behaviors going on.

I've applied to get the Remote API (along with the RE API) although as it's in lua and csv files I guess there's nothing but my own laziness stopping me from just diving in and seeing whether it's possible for me to just create a better remote map myself. I'll give it a good old check out this weekend though, see if I can tweak a few things and at least fix some of the basic default mappings like the click/loop buttons and master fader. Based on a cursory glance it looks like that's as far as that API will take me externally (and maybe not even the Master Fader).

[per-anders]

OK, so I've gone as far as I can without a proper API document. The remote map is now parred down and a few more buttons are working correctly, but master control isn't where I want it, without the known commands/ID's you can only bank in 8 faders at a time which means setting one of the faders to a master at all times is out of the question currently. Zoom also cannot work as I only know the command/id for scrolling the playhead. And track arming and selection is also out of the question for the same reasons.

There's no way that I can solve the automation controls as that requires functionality inside of Reason. TBH the same really goes for quite a few of the controls. And I don't know how to lock the control to the master + sequencer/main area without setting up a template to be loaded in each time.

At least I've cleaned out the excess stuff related to other units and elements that I don't want to have controlled by the faderport, it'll be a bit neater at this end, and Presonus say theyr'e in contact with the Props so fingers crossed they can get their heads together and make it work even in the Studio One mode (which seems to poll a bit faster than MCU, and supports every button rather than trying to process and filter at hte faderports end).

I'll carry on fiddling away and maybe at some point if i ever get the missing info I'll put the files up for others to use.

[per-anders]

And so I found this document - https://www.propellerheads.se/substance ... tables.txt which helps clear up some things.

So here's the crux of what I'll have to send to the Props with regards the "Remote" stuff (without having seen any real API).

The roadblocks that any DAW controller faces with Reason are the following :

The Map itself is incomplete. For instance you cannot Arm tracks, let alone specific tracks. There isn't even "Target Track Enable Recording", just "Target Track Enable Automation Recording". This means that the Record/Arm buttons on a Mackie DAW controller are always set up to be parameter modifiers.

Even if this were possible a single button cannot do two things, i.e. arm both automation and normal record.

And in the main area there's no corresponding fader to track setup like you have in the mixer, so you couldn't actually target a specific track or bank of tracks with the faders/arm buttons anyway.

I'll investigate a bit further, but based on my initial inspection of the lua description this is not a dynamic thing. Meaning it's basically just a bit of glue between the raw midi data and the map, converting input signals into meaningful element ID's. Which places the entire onus on logic within the map. Unfortunately the map is a static spreadsheet describing a static routing matrix. This is more than enough for most basic tasks, but with a dynamic interface e.g. where you want to change behaviors based on what data is available inside of Reason this isn't sufficient.

To give an example of the limitations. The Faderport 8 has only one rotary and no Master fader. This means we need to be able to place the rotary on any track and the Master after the normal tracks. The map can allow us to deal with the rotary because we can set a different behavior depending on both the Select button state and the overall mode (Pan etc). But placing the Master track after the last ordinary track is not possible, because the map doesn't know the contents of the channels, it's a static matrix. So it can't say "there are three tracks, therefore the master needs to show on fader 4". We can place the master on the 8th fader, but then because banking in reason is only ever 8 tracks at a time it means that every 8th track will be hidden/skipped so to navigate to it you'd need to bank forward and then channel step to see the channel appear on the Faderport itself.

The obvious solutions for that problem are either to offer a "Previous/Next 7 Remote Base Channel" command or to have a map option that makes Reason treat the Master as the final channel for the sake of output.

Some other things are currently unsupported are the scroll and zoom (currently you can only control the playhead location itself), Section (which would be the equivalent of Block selection in Reason, this is one area where Studio One does beat Reason, there you just block out in it's own track and move the blocks around as you need) and Marker (but there's no Markers in Reason so not that important, though could be used for e.g. track start/end).

I'll probably carry on and do a rudimentary map for myself and other Faderport 8 users, but it'll be very limited and wont support several basics, however I'm sure it wont be a forever situation. I have total confidence that the Props will be able to figure out some pretty nice solutions, and it's not as if some of these features wouldn't be nice for those without DAW controllers too (things like being able to arm tracks from the mixer, read/write/latch/touch modes for the mixer channels etc).

[per-anders]

Nice vids showing how the FP8 works with Studio One. I'd love to get Reason working this well with it too (or even better, I'd love to see grouping/filtering of tracks enhanced even further with multiselections of tracks and creating new bus and the ability to filter to just the selected bus'tracks or to just the bus etc).