DJing with touchAble, pt.2

As my previous post on touchAble was based on only couple hours of play, I left covering lot of the main points for later.

I played with the program today as I wanted to test if I can assign all the settings of a drum machine vst (roughly 40 knobs) to touchAble (which I can!), I ended up DJing with touchAble alone. It definitely seems to be equivalent to my previous setup (of two Launchpads & Nocturn if you haven't read the first part). I also played with the keyboard, which has a velocity sensitivity. It's not a professional substitute, but works. Also, I noticed when I was playing with my Wobblerator (my dubstep operator patch, which is available free by request), that if you press a key and switch to another mode like clips, the note will be left playing until you return to the keyboard and press another note.

I was able to switch between different tracks, racks and modes easily - touchAble is quick to use when you've had practice with the constantly changing layout. I originally tried to keep the top part for clips to see the names and progress, but then finally I was able to give up to the chaos, and got much more out. I had one or two mis-presses with the clips, but only because I didn't zoom in, which you can easily do while mixing.

Since you can't have button on/off effects with buttons, the snap mode works really well for those (as it does for any kind of riser effects). It would be great to be able to preassign some effects to always work in that mode, but the fact that the setting now toggles the selected rack, it could be a source of confusion. There is only a small setup menu as it is, and that's usually preferable.

DJs are probably interested by the fact that you can set to show two racks to EQ them at the same time, flip to adjust the volumes on the mixer site, and return back to the previous layout by pressing the then lighted device button. A very handy feature. The send effects seem to be a little further away, being under the mixer page which I usually have set for track volumes. Nothing too bad, but you might have to rethink your layout and settings a bit.

So even though I could do a DJ set with just the touchAble, I still like to keep at least something for knobs, or preferably my current setup with me. The program itself is very "Mac-like", without really requiring any manual as it is. My wife was also quick to pick up the basics when I showed her the program.