PRODUCT CONCEPT: Ableton Device Control

[iGnu]

Hi,

I would like to showcase a product concept I have been thinking about for quite some time, and ask for your feedback! I have spent a few hours trying to flush out the idea in CAD and create some renderings of how this concept could look.

Background / Use case
Im a long time Ableton user (coming from Logic) and I love the focus on music creativity instead of the audio engineering, as is the case with all other DAWs. I write, produce and mix in Abletons arrangement view and do NOT use Session view or use the application in a live-situation. I love the concept of Ableton Push 2 but it does therefore not suit my workflow.

I have spent a long time trying to have a more hands-on experience when I produce music and have been trying all different kinds of midi-controllers. I make heavy use of grouping instruments and FX into ”Instrument Racks” and mapping the most useful parameters to the 8 (or more) macro knobs for easy access, tweaking and automation.

I also try to save all my most used 3rd party plugins into rack-presets and really like Abletons ”Device Control”-functionality: to be able to automatically control the most important parameters of any device you select!

There is no perfect solution on the market, and I have owned the Akai APC-series, stuff from Novation, built my own midi controllers and scripted other products into having Device Control. Either it has stuff I don’t need (clip launch for example) or the tactile knob feel is not what I want. I currently am using my Yamaha Montage 6 with a custom script to have the synths knobs do Device Control.



Purpose
- To fulfil the need a dedicated high-end knob controller for Abletons ”Device Control”.
It also has to be able to hard map knobs to different things in Ableton, such as ”DJ-filters” on the master channel.

- The size is 15x20cm and should sit perfect next to a keyboard and mouse. The top is at an angle, it has an empty ”hand-resting” space at the bottom and the control are laid out for the most ergonomic experience.
- It has no specific functionality for Session view or working with clips, I think it would rather complement a device such as a Launchpad or Push 2.
- Tactility, responsiveness and ”knob-feel” are of the highest importance.

Overview
8 knobs grouped into 4 different banks, choosable by the bank-select buttons directly underneath.

Press ”DEVICE CONTROL” and the knobs controls any selected device in Ableton.
Press ”CHANNEL CONTROL” and the knobs corresponds to the mixer controls for the selected channel.
Press ”BANK 1” and the knobs sends out CC-values that can be hard-mapped to different things in Ableton.
Press ”BANK 2” and you have a second bank of hard-mappable knobs.

Transport Control
- Play, Stop, Record, Metronome On/Off and Loop On/Off.
- The arrow button shifts the device selection left and right.
- Quantize and Duplicate buttons for quick access when editing in Arrangement view or the piano editor.

Knobs
- High resolution incremental encoders. No encoder steps.
- A very tactile knob-feel, with perfect turning resistance.
- No knob position feedback, instead moving a knob to the right always increases the value and vice versa.
- Choosable control speed: slow, fast and accerated turning behaviour.

Knob Light Guides
- Possibility to set the RGBW color for each knob in each ”bank” (Device control, Channel Control, Bank1 and Bank2)
Example: All white in Device Control-mode, Green1 Blue2 White3-8 in Channel Control-mode, Rainbow in Bank1 and Purple in Bank2.
- The purpose is to have a consistent visual feedback for easy navigation.

Buttons
- The button are made of a soft rubber-like material and have a sturdy but tactile ”clicky” feel when pressed.
- The button-texts are translucent with a white light and blinks when pressed.
- The Bank-select buttons gets dimmed when not in the selected mode.


Other considerations or things to improve further
- Combining the Play and Stop buttons into one, giving space for 1 or 2 additional buttons.
And/or adding a new row of buttons. Possible button functions:

• Mute / Solo
  Save
  Device On/Off
  Zoom In/Out
  Undo
  Delete
  Session/Arrangement View
  Hide/Show Browser
  Etc..

- Adding one knob to each row for a total of 10 knobs, and have knob 5 always control channel volume and knob 10 always control channel pan.


I would like to hear what you guys think.. are you also in need of a product like this?
Do you have any input or feedback, or maybe would like to continue work on this concept?

I would love to have Ableton or maybe Native Instruments, Novation or Akai make something like this.

Best regards,
Emil

[ekwipt]

it looks great, i'd get one if the price was right t

[iGnu]

it looks great, i'd get one if the price was right t

Thanks! Any feature you miss or think is not necessary?
What would be a reasonable price do you think? Im leaning towards 400 euro depending on materials.

[circuitslave]

Looks cool and very Native Instruments-like! The problem I see is it’s only one aspect or a small portion of Ableton control. There’s already a bunch of controllers on the market. What about adding some faders for additional control? I don’t know…….but the readers look cool!

[Calagan]

Looks amazing !!!

Here are my views on it :
- the missing stuff in already existing devices (to me) are the freely assignable buttons. I hope the buttons of your project device can be freely assignable, to a CC or anything else, and I hope you can choose latch or momentary (and such things)
- the price seems high in absolute (to me), but I doubt it can be much cheaper and the concurrence seems to be expensive too, so maybe it's just an issue for me

I would love to have such a device and to be able to freely assign buttons to whatever suits my workflow (I don't necessarily needs panning or track volume for exemple).
I spent quite a lot of time, while mixing or playing live, mapping features to stuff on my keyboard, and I would love to have such a device...
But I truly think the freedom to set the buttons is important. What you propose for the knobs (and especially the switching to "device control", channel control" and CC banks) is amazing and to my knowledge it's not found elsewhere... If it's the same for the buttons it's top notch...

[iGnu]

Looks amazing !!!

Here are my views on it :
- the missing stuff in already existing devices (to me) are the freely assignable buttons. I hope the buttons of your project device can be freely assignable, to a CC or anything else, and I hope you can choose latch or momentary (and such things)
- the price seems high in absolute (to me), but I doubt it can be much cheaper and the concurrence seems to be expensive too, so maybe it's just an issue for me

I would love to have such a device and to be able to freely assign buttons to whatever suits my workflow (I don't necessarily needs panning or track volume for exemple).
I spent quite a lot of time, while mixing or playing live, mapping features to stuff on my keyboard, and I would love to have such a device...
But I truly think the freedom to set the buttons is important. What you propose for the knobs (and especially the switching to "device control", channel control" and CC banks) is amazing and to my knowledge it's not found elsewhere... If it's the same for the buttons it's top notch...

Thanks for your input! Could you describe your use case with assignable buttons? what would you assign them to?
i am a bit hesitant of having all the transport-control be assignable, since the labeling would be out of sync.

Some suggestions:
Adding another row of the 4 smaller buttons that are assignable (would 4 be enough?)
Adding pushbutton functionality to the knobs, that are all assignable in every "bank". 32 different button assignments.

Regarding the price, in my mind this should not be a super-cheap device. Instead focus should be on materials, integration and tactile feel. I would personally spend 800 euro on it (especially if it had a cast aluminium housing) but a reasonable price may be something like the Rocksolid SSL Midi controller? Kind of same level of material quality and niche functionality: https://rocksolidaudio.co.uk/products/micro-4k (300 euro)

[iGnu]

edit

[M-bition]

A x-y pad at the bottom would be nice

[Calagan]

Looks amazing !!!

Here are my views on it :
- the missing stuff in already existing devices (to me) are the freely assignable buttons. I hope the buttons of your project device can be freely assignable, to a CC or anything else, and I hope you can choose latch or momentary (and such things)
- the price seems high in absolute (to me), but I doubt it can be much cheaper and the concurrence seems to be expensive too, so maybe it's just an issue for me

I would love to have such a device and to be able to freely assign buttons to whatever suits my workflow (I don't necessarily needs panning or track volume for exemple).
I spent quite a lot of time, while mixing or playing live, mapping features to stuff on my keyboard, and I would love to have such a device...
But I truly think the freedom to set the buttons is important. What you propose for the knobs (and especially the switching to "device control", channel control" and CC banks) is amazing and to my knowledge it's not found elsewhere... If it's the same for the buttons it's top notch...

Thanks for your input! Could you describe your use case with assignable buttons? what would you assign them to?
i am a bit hesitant of having all the transport-control be assignable, since the labeling would be out of sync.

Some suggestions:
Adding another row of the 4 smaller buttons that are assignable (would 4 be enough?)
Adding pushbutton functionality to the knobs, that are all assignable in every "bank". 32 different button assignments.

Regarding the price, in my mind this should not be a super-cheap device. Instead focus should be on materials, integration and tactile feel. I would personally spend 800 euro on it (especially if it had a cast aluminium housing) but a reasonable price may be something like the Rocksolid SSL Midi controller? Kind of same level of material quality and niche functionality: https://rocksolidaudio.co.uk/products/micro-4k (300 euro)

My use case for assignable buttons ?
I use Live on stage, and I use a lot of buttons on my Novation keyboard :
- one is mapped to a pitch device that does +3 octaves and another to a pitch device that makes -3 octaves, both placed before my instrument rack (that has dozen of chains). I find it easier to switch instruments, because I don't need to map something in each of my rack : I can plan to put the bass in the low area and the rhodes in the middle in song A, then the intro synth in the lows, chorus synth in the middle, verse synth in the highs for song B, and so on.
- another ones are mapped to track mute buttons that contains sequences or clic. If I need to mute the clic for a moment, or hear a sequence in my IEM, it's a button away.
- I like the fact the buttons are in toggle mode and give me an indication of what I'm doing. In some song, I can use a button to alternate between a chain and another (I try not to map the button to the chain selector, but just to use a M4L device mapped to the chain that can receive midi messages and acts accordingly).
- I use a button also as a "stop all clips" button in session view, and I think it's not the same as the normal stop button that stops the play in arrangement view.
- I can use two buttons to go up and down in my scenes (in session view), so I don't need to touch my computer on stage in order to play song A or song B (I need a visual though).
And so on and so on...

While mixing, I can imagine many ways of using buttons and knobs to ease my life, and I know panning and track volume are not one of them (I prefer to use the mouse, especially for panning - I must admit I never mixed with knobs controlling track faders, so I may discover a whole world of fun and happiness).
- For exemple, I like to map temporarily a key (or a button) as an AB switch between two versions of a track or two version of an FX rack. After I choosed my favorite, I remove the mapping.
- I like also to mix and be able to turn off a whole bus : for exemple the vocals bus, or the drums bus, or the bass bus... Again, it's great to have some buttons in toggle mode that are mapped to the 4 main busses of your mix, and be able to switch between different perspectives in your mix.
- I like to map a key (or a button) to Metric AB, so I can alternate between my track and my reference track without being obliged to open Metric AB

Again, uses cases are infinite, and I would not be very happy to have some knob pre-mapped to feature I never use.

I often use the little Behringer X-Touch Mini, and I never used the pre-programmed mode. I just made my own config (which is a pain because you need to use Windows and I'm on Mac) and I just manage to use the CC21 or CC25 to map such and such feature in Live

[circuitslave]

Looks cool and very Native Instruments-like! The problem I see is it’s only one aspect or a small portion of Ableton control. There’s already a bunch of controllers on the market. What about adding some faders for additional control? I don’t know…….but the renders look cool!

[circuitslave]

Looks cool and very Native Instruments-like! The problem I see is it’s only one aspect or a small portion of Ableton control. There’s already a bunch of controllers on the market. What about adding some faders for additional control? I don’t know…….but the renders look cool!

[MusicIsMath]

Regarding the price, in my mind this should not be a super-cheap device. Instead focus should be on materials, integration and tactile feel. I would personally spend 800 euro on it (especially if it had a cast aluminium housing) but a reasonable price may be something like the Rocksolid SSL Midi controller? Kind of same level of material quality and niche functionality: https://rocksolidaudio.co.uk/products/micro-4k (300 euro)

800 Euro's?
Naa, not for me, something like this would top out at £250-300 max for me. Anything beyond that takes it in to professional's territory and it would massively effect sales to the point that you'd be better selling at the lower margin to equal better sales.

[grrrz]

I'm looking for a comprehensive remote both for live devices and more in depth for vsts and the novation sl mk3 seems really to be the best option; it has screens with feedback and parameter names; you can go through every parameter in DAW mode; and you have the choice of usinge device control in daw mode for a list of parameters in the form of rotary encoder or creating a full template for your vst with parameter names; where you can also use pads; buttons and fader. the push does something similar but it's less interesting for non-ableton VSTs, as you can't do custom mapping with the buttons row.
your proposition is interesting, it lacks feedback but I guess it's for looking at your screen. maybe you can have a companion software overlay that always displays what your buttons do (and the must is a screen; but another budget). I'll also consider toggle buttons, at least 4; with leds; because that's really something you need to take full control of a plugin. they could work with the banks; or somehow be mapped with the control device (I'm not sure you can discriminate in remote scripts if a control is a knob or button though). also can you go through several banks of parameters or is it only the first eight?

[ekwipt]

Personally from a business point of view, what I'd do is actually build it for as cheap as possible and sell as many units as you can, and make a second iteration with a "Pro" feel and price, only if you sell enough of the initial units, so you don't sink too much money into it. I think it's a great concept