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View Full Version : Handy MIDI etc. controllers for home recording



deeaa
October 6th, 2009, 09:58 AM
I bought a Korg NanoKontrol today for Cubase, thought I'd share some of my first experiences.

It's an ingenious piece of gear...google it for how it looks etc...but basically, what I needed it for was controlling Cubase tracks.

It was natural and easy to set it to Cubase with a template available.
It's simply set to control the nine first channels in Cubase, whatever they happen to be. It gives the tracks volume faders, dedicated mute and solo buttons and a pan knob, along with overall controls like play and rwd etc.

I always use group tracks in Cubase, i.e. any one type guitar tracks get assigned to a submix track 'guitars 1' instead of directly to master, which of course helps a lot as you can add FX etc. to whole guitar tracks at once in inserts instead of editing each for instance close-miked and far-miked guitar track directly (although of course you need to do that too). But I have seldom used more than 5 group tracks.

Now I set it so that I'll just always use nine group tracks onto which I'll assign the individual tracks, and always just drag them to be the first tracks. That way I have faders for nine master tracks being:

1 kick
2 snare
3 drums (rest of 'em)
4 bass
5 guitars 1
6 guitars 2
7 lead guitars / synths
8 vocals
9 backing vox etc.

Quick tests with a couple of old mixes arranged this way, and I was smiling wide I tell you. There is after all nothing like being able to just control volume faders instead of going to each channel with a mouse and painstakingly trying different settings one fader at a time. Now I can use all my fingers and just quickly try umpteen different settings in seconds!!! MARVELLOUS!!!

So, at a tad over 50 euros I definitely would recommend the thing, yeah!

There is one small gripe - you can't control the lights on the buttons. If they are in 'momentary' switching mode the light will only be on when pressed. And since Cubase requires momentary for solo etc...the lights won't stay on, indicating which channel is muted etc. Of course you see it on the Cubase screen, but it'd have been nice indeed to have the play light stay on when play is on etc...

The thing also has a possiblity to save several 'scenes' so you can store the usage for different programs as well, or also use it as an FX controller I guess...but that requires manual routing of MIDI commands, so maybe later. For now, this is more than I hoped for.

I also already had the Shuttle controller, which gives a good jog wheel with 3 layers and 5 buttons, and that is also WAY excellent in recording stuff...no need to jump to the mouse etc. when recording; I can stand six feet from the computer and still select tracks, forward, rewind, play, stop, rec and undo at a press of a button. Makes for quick and easy retries. For instance singing, just press undo and rec and you can do it over and over again till you got a good take. Imagine having to stumble to the computer and find the mouse, rew, put on rec, run back to guitar/mic and try...feels just stupid now I hadn't gotten these gadgets earlier. They make for so much easier and more efficient home recording it's almost like having your own engineer helping.