Comfortable fader length?

easlern

easlern

Boredom artist
I've been thinking of making a midi controller off and on for a while, because I can't find one that has exactly what I want. Just wondering how it'd be laid out at this point really. I got knobs and buttons sussed out I think but what size fader (slide pot) to get? I'd guess like 5" long or so? Anybody have any experience/opinions with faders (I only ever owned a keyboard with some dinky ones on it.)
 
You'll find that the most common standard length on pro mixers is 100 millimetres (around 4 inches). You should get a good choice of faders at this size and it's certainly long enough to make precise changes, especially if you set you gain structure to work in the "sweet spot" around the zero mark.
 
Yeah that looks great for faders. And there are some other real nice looking controllers I'd enjoy using too, I just haven't found one with enough knobs. I get frustrated having to open and adjust each channel with a mouse. So I want a full set of knobs for eq, compression, and pan for each channel. Like a poor man's console.
 
Thanks bobbsy, that's exactly what I'm looking for. I saw a lot of listings with "travel length 100mm" but they had different physical lengths so I was confused. 100mm didn't sound like much, shoulda done the conversion.
 
Fader length? The longer, the better.

I have an old Studiomaster with really nice faders I'm lightly considering making into a Arduino powered worksurface.
 
I think I had an oh-duh moment, there appear to be MIDI controllers with a set of faders that each control a different track (great) and a good number of knobs that all affect one track at a time (great!) So like you have 8 faders, one each for 8 tracks. But you can also hit a button to say "all the knobs now correspond to the track of this particular fader" and then all your knob moves apply to that specific track. That would be just fine, I wouldn't mind switching tracks real quick with a button, and that way you don't need a huge controller for all the knobs anyway. . . so not quite a console but close enough I think! It'll still be faster than a mouse. I just gotta find one that works out of the box with Logic. . .
 
That is how all the digital mixers work too. You have just enough knobs for one channel strip and you have to select which channel you want to do something with. That's state of the art standard, even with the really big, $100,000 control surfaces and mixers.

100mm is the standard 'long' fader.
 
That's interesting, when I think console I always picture the big 24-channels with a huge channel strip, sends, etc over each fader. I guess that's a little out-dated now. . .
 
easlern said:
That's interesting, when I think console I always picture the big 24-channels with a huge channel strip, sends, etc over each fader. I guess that's a little out-dated now. . .
Click to expand...
Analog boards are like that, digital boards (in general) are not. Control surfaces were always like that.
 
Just as an example, my digital mixer has 48 channels but only 16 faders (plus a master). The faders are switchable in 4 "layers" which give 3 layers of 16 inputs plus a fourth when gives 8 Aux sends and 8 buses.

That said, for live use, "fader per channel" mixers are becoming more popular even in digital, especially for live work.
 
Well, I'm thinking I might live without faders after all, my big pet peeve right now is tweaking plugins. I got my keyboard's rotary encoders working with logic last night though so that's a big step. There aren't enough for full eq/comp but definitely helpful.

I looked at some controllers with 16 or more encoders and they're either big or expensive or both. I'm gonna wait a bit and see how I feel, maybe get by for a while with the encoders on my keyboard. On a whim I spent $10 for some encoders/knobs on ebay, maybe I can piece together my ideal controller on the cheap. . .
 
Ultimately these things all just send CCs, and your DAW does with those as if will. Being "compatible" with a given DAW basically means configuring it so that it sends (and receives) the CCs that the DAW expects. Most of them have a way to save different configurations of which knob or button sends which CC, and give you some way of accessing these "presets" on the fly. Different DAWs give you different levels of control over which CC does what to who.

The Korg NanoKontrols can be found for extremely cheap. The old v1s are even cheaper if you look on ebay or similar. The new ones have one more button per strip while the old ones have one more whole strip which means an extra knob and fader. V1 has a total of 18 variable controllers (know + faders) and the new one had 16.

They are not that hard to hack apart, either. Get whatever pots/switches/faders you want, install them in a box, and then attach them to the appropriate places on the PCB to replace the original parts. Saves having to design and program the MIDI brain part yourself. I have a couple of the v1s that I'm going to do this with "eventually". My thing is to make a "pedalboard", so I'm just using all rotary pots in place of the faders, and I have to figure out a way to use latching toggles for in place of the momentary button things... I saw a video of a dude doing something similar, but I have to take issue with the fact that he left the original rotary pots connected to the circuit. For best results, those things really need to be cut free, else they're in parallel with your new pots, and can't help but mess things up no matter where you turn them to.
 
That's pretty cool ashcat, I didn't know people customized their controllers. That's a good idea with reusing controllers too, if I could think of some way to add more pieces and get the existing board to use them that could save a lot of time. I'm not sure I'd know how to do that. But if they're cheap enough and slim enough, maybe I could just chain a couple or even take them apart and chain them in a single chassis.
 
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