Control Surface???? I want faders!!!!!

hello everybody my name is barry johns and this is studio talk for those of you have been watching my other videos i want to thank you a lot your comments have been encouraging and the discussion back and forth amongst you is is really inspiring to me which is kind of what i'm trying to do with this channel create an open dialogue for discussion and talk about the things that we all enjoy as you can tell by the title of this particular video we're going to talk about control surfaces today you know obviously i kind of grotchy in by talking about the faders but faders are on control surfaces if you don't know you know i've been using control services for probably 10 to 15 years i remember as some of you may know already i'm primarily a pro tools user but i also use logic a lot as well and but i would say the majority of my experience over the last 15 years or so has been pro tools i have dabbled in all the other daws and maybe you call it dos you know like i'm a guitar player i call it 412. you probably call it 4x12 but anyway i think we're on the same page but i i've experimented with the majority of them be it cubase be it logic obviously digital performer pro tools there's some new ones out there that are great today they're whatever makes you feel comfortable there is no such thing as the industry standard anymore you know that's gone by the wayside and for good reason you know um the only advantage of sticking with the same daw is if you uh you know you you do a lot of work with friends and you collaborate and things like that it makes that process so much easier but anyway that's not what this video is about so i started with control services again probably maybe 12 years ago maybe a little bit longer and i started with pro tools with a command a now that was an outstanding control surface for the money back in the day and today i think you can pick one up for about 250 bucks and it's still a great control service for the money if you're using it with pro tools it doesn't have all of the advantages that you can get with uconn today but it is tied to just pro tools and pro tools alone after that i eventually navigated and graduated i should say up to the pro control i actually got an incredible deal i've been very lucky with getting great deals on control services use i buy almost all of my gear use i rarely buy something new but i got a great deal on a 32 channel pro control and you talk about that thing looking great and it was massive and it was a room much bigger than this and it took up almost the entire width of the room because the faders are so spaced so far spaced apart and i used that for a lot of years and i guess maybe about five years ago maybe maybe a little bit more but roughly in that time frame i purchased what i have right now which is a 24 channel digi digi design d command and the the integration with pro tools on that is off the charts i would argue that it's better than current s3s or any current avid you know home studio based person you know i'm not going to compare it with the big s6 s sixes and things like that i have to imagine those have to be better for the price they better be for the money but this thing is really really really well integrated within pro tools fantastic i actually got an email the other day i think it's called new trick or it's the company that that writes code to be able to use um daws but control services like the pro controller like the d command with other daws and so i'm going to help them beta test uh some of the things to see if we can you know develop ways to be able to use this with logic and other daws so that'll be exciting i'm very happy to be part of that part of that program but anyway to say the least i have a lot of experience with control services and i feel like i can speak about my experiences now your experiences may be different today i'm going to talk about mine i'm also going to talk about what i've experienced in in you know communication back and forth with other users of control surfaces over the many years i've always been fairly active in a lot of the recording forums out there i enjoy talking about it which is kind of the inspiration for me doing these videos and and i and i really enjoy that so i've gotten a lot of feedback from other folks and i was i was laying in bed the other night and i was thinking man that would make a great video i should probably do that and so that's where we are today so um so back to back to the original discussion you know control services they look amazing whether it's an 8 channel 16 channel 2432 no matter how far you go with it when you walk into a home project studio and you've got a control surface it looks great and for people who don't know anything whatsoever about what we do it's impressive is all get out if you're bringing clients into your studio maybe you're mixing maybe you're just recording vocals doing some you know overdubs or you know maybe you're doing guitar tracks or bass tracks a lot of us don't have the space to do drums and things like that or more importantly the the proper room to really effectively do that um so we limit ourselves to those type of of recording and of course a lot a lot of us use virtual instruments as well but you know when you when you think about it when you walk in and see that man it's impressive i'm going to tell you that thing back there it is the centerpiece of my studio it looks fantastic and it makes me feel good when i walk in just to look at if i never used a single thing on it it looks great okay and i happen to got a great deal on that and i'll share that with you right now real quick there was a clearinghouse i guess the studio went out of business out in la and i don't think they were used to dealing with um with music gear and so they had no idea what they had and so i bought the main unit uh which at the time was going for about forty five hundred to five thousand dollars just for the eight channel main part of it and i got it for like seventeen hundred dollars i couldn't believe it seventeen hundred bucks and then i as soon as i saw it i mean i didn't even think about it i didn't talk to my wife i did nothing buy it now and i bought it then i went back and looked later on that afternoon and they had the 16 channel expansion pack for eleven hundred dollars that was unbelievable so i had what you think i'd do i had buy it now i didn't talk to my wife i don't think i ever told her that i spent the money don't recommend doing that but that's what i did and and i bought it and then and then i got an incredible deal i just these things just came at me all of a sudden maybe the man upstairs says hey we're gonna bless your studio or wherever you look to for that type of thing it came from somewhere that's all i got to tell you there was a um a post facility i live in central florida and there was a post-production facility um in atlanta that was selling the argosy desert that it's in that's custom made for the control tool i mean it's not at the control 24 but the um the d command and and i got it for 500 bucks at things like 2 800 if you bought it new when i got it so i went and i rented a u-haul trailer and i drove up to six hours up to atlanta i packed it in stayed overnight and drove it home and set it up in here and here we are so i know that doesn't really relate to the conversation but hey look out for good deals so anyway let's get back on topic so i've been using control services for a very long time and and there are times i've had love hate relationships with them and i think for a lot of people they can be a godsend to your workflow and your productivity when you really embrace it and really learn every aspect of that control surface you can really get great mileage of it mileage out of it okay but if you're not willing to dedicate the time that it takes to do it you're likely to resort back to your muscle memory of your mouse and your keyboard shortcuts so let's talk about muscle memory okay that is vital to being able to truly maximize a control surface hang on i'm going to reach down here real quick i'm not a professional video guy so if i bend over just deal with it okay so a lot of you guys have seen this bad boy i'm trying this bad boy out right now putting it through its paces um if you're not aware this is a solid state logics control surface for their ssl native plug-in as well as their bus compressor and as you can see it is laid out um in the exact orientation of their plug-in they actually redesigned their plug-in to make it match this and now this kind of matches you know what you see in most other manufacturers ssl plugins but this is just for that and you know what it's for it's for one well really two plugins it's for the ssl native and then the bus compressor in the middle you know i'll be giving you on my opinions on the control surface itself not the plugins if you want to learn about the plugins hey there's a free demo go get it yourself and then play around with it yourself but i'll be talking about my experiences with that i'm not sure if i'm going to keep it yet but stay tuned for uh stay tuned for more information on that so so to take advantage of that just talk about that one alone for a second you've got to have great muscle memory and i would argue that you know a control surface like that which is just dedicated to the plug-in and you could argue that does that make sense but let's don't go there right now um but the key to be able to maximize you got to get muscle memory down where you just don't even think about it you immediately know where you're going to do what eq curve you're going to do what frequency you're going to do and all of the like how much you're you know where that where the gain and reduction is you know for each individual frequency you got to get muscle memory you got to be able to do that if it's going to make sense to you otherwise you'll find you probably you're just already so used to using a mouse you're likely just a even though that control surface is in front of you you're most likely going to reach for that mouse and that keyboard shortcut simply because it's what you're used to which means what muscle memory so if you're going to get let's say you don't have one right now and this you know or you have one right now but you feel like you're just not getting the most out of it looks cool and everything you like the idea of it but you question whether or not you're getting the efficiency that you need out of it to justify the expense we all have to spend our money wisely we don't we're none of us well i'm not rich let me tell you that so i just can't buy everything everything i've got in this studio has been amassed over decades okay i rarely sell equipment unless i'm upgrading it to something better but rarely do i sell something and not replace it with something and so ultimately i want to get the most value for my money and and when you're looking at a lot of control services whether ssl's got a great one i think it's called the u8 or something like that you can look that up uh of course there's the mackie mcu um you know their avid makes quite a few of them there's just there's quite a few great ones out there that do a great job you know you'll find limitations with that most non-avid control surfaces you're going to find limitations within pro tools and so i caution you in that if you're a pro tools user do not consider anything but avid control services that's just my advice my experience i had an mcu back in the day i was earlier adopter of that that was back in a time where i was exploring different daws you may call them dolls i call it daw but regardless you know what i mean and i experimented with a lot of those and so that mcu enabled me to kind of utilize it on all of those while i was experimenting over about six months to a year at the same time while i was using pro tools again i had to force myself to leave pro tools alone no matter what i wanted to do no matter how fast and how good i was at it and dedicate it just to that daw otherwise i'm not really truly going to know whether or not that's going to be comfortable for me or not and so ultimately i have experience with that when we talked about my my digi design slash well i guess all minor digits i don't have any avids i've used avid control services but um but they all basically do the same thing so at the end of the day you know you've got to be able to get your mileage out of it and you've got to ask yourself am i getting my mileage out of my control service does it justify what i've spent on it or would it make more sense for me just to sell it and buy something else or i've been dreaming of a control surface forever and i really want one well i'm going to ask you question why you want one what is it you want look if you just want to buy it to look cool and you got money to burn then do it but make sure if that's not the case that you're going to be able to get your mileage out of it because uh you may find that that you may not use it my advice if you get a control surface turn your computer monitors off no matter how many you have and focus just on the mixing aspect of it and plug-ins okay yes with control service you can do editing in the edit window i would still argue that today it's better to do that with a mouse i don't care what control surface you've got but if you're moving faders and you're doing plugins and you're writing well we could have a debate about automation i still find it easier and more effective to draw automation versus do it with a control surface because it's hard to get that consistency where i can draw that perfect line uh but let's just say faders and plug-in control you know if you're fast at it that could be really fast especially if you like to mix fast and so turn your monitors off just turn them off and do not turn them back on when you're mixing force yourself to get it in half to learn that thing i even set my computer keyboard and mouse i move them out of the side where i can't even grab them if i can't do everything i need to do okay with the exception of a few odd little things that may pop up with my control surface then i'm simply not getting the most out of it because they will do the work that you want to do or at least the vast majority of them will so you're going to have to dedicate your time to get in there and really really learn that if you don't do that in this guy's opinion the cost is simply not likely to be justified unless you're doing it for bling i enjoy bling just like you i'm going to show a video of bling of that bad boy behind me kind of while i'm talking you know that's what's called vegas mode which is kind of a demo mode and and other some moving up and down that i filmed for you before but you know it's cool looking at that stuff it's cool watching that stuff and if you're really good at using it it's a powerful powerful tool i'm not so sure my skill set and where i'm at not my skill set because i know how to use it i should rather say the amount of time that i actually spend doing this thing that we love recording because you know i got kids i've got a job i've got other things you know some of you guys are younger guys and you can spend every waking hour doing that i can't so again these things you have to evaluate but you know i i think you've got to really learn to get in there and learn how to use it otherwise you're not going to get what you're looking for from it or not likely to and so you should always consider that you know maybe you buy one and you you buy it from sweetwater or whatever manufacturer who has great return policies and you use it for a month or whatever their return period is and if you can get the value of it if you can't get the value of it and you're probably not going to learn every aspect of it in a month even truly dedicating yourself to it but you should be able to good feeling if you can't box it back up and return it you know i'm i don't suggest doing that just to try and see i'm only suggesting if you really really really want to consider it like i did with that solid state logic piece down there um you know then then then try it out otherwise consider something else when you think about it a lot of the the the great mixers of today you know they don't use control surfaces just think about all the webinars and things like that that you see let's talk about pensado's place or you know some of the others out there and you know a lot of them they don't use i would argue most of them if they're not mixing on a true analog console they're probably not using a control surface you rarely actually ever see that and you gotta wonder why these guys have all the money in the world okay you know they're not like mega million rich but they're doing pretty darn good better than you and i likely and they can afford to to buy control surfaces if they want to but they don't they use a lot of them random trackballs and things like that and that's what they use and i know i'm super fast with the mouse and and a keyboard shortcuts you know like i said i go back and forth between logic and pro tools a lot and so when i go to logic obviously that control service back there does not control um logic i mean obviously you know i talked i think i talked about the new trick thing before and being part of that program so maybe eventually that'll come out and i'll explore that for sure but today i have to do keyboard shortcuts and everything else and learn that and so i'm super fast at it and that's what kind of reminds me from time to time does a control service for me make sense today i have no intentions of selling my control service because i do know how to use it and i get good use out of it but i've also been doing this for a long time honestly today if i were starting from scratch i'm not so sure i'd get one and some of you may not want to hear that and some of you that are watching this who love your control surfaces you may not want to hear that remember i'm talking about me you got to make the decision for you only you can do that but for me i'm not so sure i'd get one just because of how fast i am with keyboard shortcuts in my mouse you know it's like anything else muscle memory muscle memory i can't say that enough to get the most out of your control surface you got to be great at muscle memory so hopefully today's conversation has got you thinking about whether a control surface makes sense for you or not you know i would ask that that for those of you what your exp if you have experiences both positive and negative if you had one and sold it if you just bought one you're in love with it whatever it is talk about that in the comment section below let me hear from you and let each of you hear from each other i think open dialogue is really important about these things because we all want to learn from each other you know all of us love the idea of a mixing console we all do just think of sound city for a second and that iconic neve board that today is in dave gross home studio okay now that's not a control service that's a real die hard amazing freaking honest console okay that i would kill to have a couple recording sessions with you know i'd love to experience that but i'm not likely to ever do that i've got a few neve preamps back there or neve emulations not emulations but anyway you know what i'm talking about i've got some 500 series units and some well as some regular 19 inch rack units that are other manufacturers who clone neve i guess that's neve clones i should say and i love them i love the sound of those but anyway my point behind that is it looks amazing just the idea of all those faders moving around just looks killer and your ability to touch and feel it's an experience and for some that experience may be enough justification alone if it puts you in the zone and makes you feel good about what you're doing you're most likely going to make better choices but if you find you're reaching for that mouse and keyboard quite frequently you should probably ask yourself does that control service make sense so anyway that's it for today's conversation i hope you guys have enjoyed this you know like i said in the beginning this is the infancy of this particular youtube channel i'm going to keep doing this whether you watch or not because i simply love talking about this stuff but if you do watch and you do like it do me a favor hit that like button that subscribe button and what oh that notification belt whatever there's popping up below just hit the things down there especially the subscribe and the notification that way you'll know when i put a new video i'm going to try to put one out every week and give you guys something to think about and to talk about and give me something to talk about on my own because like i said i love talking about this stuff so you know what you should do until next time you should have a great day

Channel: Barry Johns Studio Talk

Views: 23,795

Keywords: avid, protools, protools hdx, protools ultimate, hdx, avid omni, avid hdx, avid hybrid engine, avid carbon, avid hdx hybrid engine, cubase, logic pro, studio one, universal audio, daw, studio, recording, recording studio, home recording, post production, audio, gearslutz, avid.com, avid DUC, duc, Digidesign DUC, presonus, uad, control surface, plugin, plugins, compressor, delay, reverb, uc1, ssl, solid state logic, neve, microphone, preamp, eq, equalizer, 500 series, a designs, warm audio

Id: NiuFnEAFQ_E

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021