Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Warren  . . .
Michael, how you are liking it so far? Has it been easy to setup and implement? Any immediate drawbacks, or anything so amazing you're like 'Holy crap, where I have been without this?' [unlikely to hear from Michael Wagener, but still a valid question  ] |
I like it a lot. The one hurdle I had/have to get over is, the MC can be configured any which way, so you can have your transport controls on the left or right and the same with any soft switch. That is very confusing in the beginning until you have it set up exactly the way you want it for your style of editing etc. Once you do, you can save your preferences in a file and recall them at the beginning of the session. There might even be a way to make it start up with your setting automatically, but I haven't found that yet. Once you get used to your personal layout, it becomes immensely useful and it would be really hard to live without it, saves a lot of time. Right now I'm still finding new and exciting things which immediatly get incorporated into my layout. It actually does a
lot more than I initially had expected.
I jumped right in and used it during the current recording sessions, without getting into the manual too deeply and it has not hindered the flow of the session at all. The good part is, that you can still use the keyboard as much as you want, if you get into a pinch. The main thing it does, it keeps you from having to access a ton of menus and lays out the important functions (any you want) on the surface. I have it set up so my right hand can pretty much stay on the trackball plus control the transport functions and the left hand is doing all the button pushing and scrolling for the editing functions. It is definitely an improvement in handling "computer tasks". Nuendo starts feeling like a tape machine/console setup again, and I can concentrate more on production rather than engineering.
The other good thing is, the box is so intimidating to anybody who has not worked with it before, musicians stay away from it and don't touch any controls they are not supposed to touch.
Since I am still using the Sony consoles, I am not missing any faderpacks right now. Maybe one day when I move to completely mixing in the box, I might add some faderpacks.
The only downside I can think of is one unique to my setup. It sits on my right side, next to the console, so I am listening mostly with my left ear (mono) to the speakers when I am facing the MC. It makes it a bit harder to get into the zone when mixing. This would not happen if the MC was set up correctly in the middle between the speakers. Some day...
