Got it. Thanks a lot, this helped.
Does anybody have the SSL Nucleus? The price is quite steep, of course you get nice SSL hardware and audio interface with it. I personally would not need that but I’ve seen some Nucleus used for €2k, so I don’t mind the audio inputs 
€2k would be interesting again.
Do the knobs work with third party plugins? Are all parameters accessible? How’s the config software? From what I’ve seen first hand, the EuControl software for programming S3 or PT Dock is quite horrible. Is the SSL version better? What is your experience?
Also, let me do a 180° turn here, does anybody use Steinberg’s CC121? It seems to be old but for simple stuff it seems mobile and solid. But after Steinberg dropped so many hardware controllers, I don’t know what to think of the CC121.
Somebody said Yamaha won’t be doing any other controlers but Nuage in order not to cannibalize themselves. I don’t know but small project studios who would never buy such a big system would probably go for something lower range. It would also increase sales, not just lower them. I have neither room nor budget for the Nuage, but maybe I’d go for a Nuage Light.
I think the Nucleus is plain HUI.
And I think I was the one talking about a lower priced Yamaha device taking customers away from Nuage. I think it’s just the way it’ll end up considering how the Nuage is priced. Or to put it differently, medium sized businesses are also trying to cut costs, and I’ve seen several places here in the US move from professional larger Avid controllers to the Artist series when the older ones got discontinued - meaning they skipped the s6-series. It makes sense if they want to save money. Nobody in the middle wants to blow 40+k dollars if they can spend 4k and still function. So, my point was just that for that same middle ground of the market it would make sense to consider a cheaper Yamaha controller instead of a Nuage if the option existed. I think there are likely a lot of businesses who would consider buying a Nuage but would rather get almost all of what they need from a much cheaper controller from Yamaha instead.
Understood and probably right. But these studios now go (or went) to AVID and don’t buy from Yamaha. And would they not make up in volume? Yes, one big studio would downgrade, and 20 others would buy. I don’t know. It depends on the product and price of course, know the price elasticity and how big this market would be. Anyway, let’s see what happens. I just think it’s sad Steinberg only has 1 controller, the C121 left. All others are discontinued. Nuage is huge and expensive, many people want to avoid AVID but EuCon is great, all other controllers are HUI or Mackie Protocol and are also about 6-10 years old. Maybe the controller market is not interesting anymore. Just to be devil’s advocate: People want to make beats and tunes and get their auto-tune master piece on streaming services. Serious mixing and working on content has become an afterthought market. It’s not where the money is anymore. Why else are there tons of new controllers with beat pads and blinking push buttons, but no serious control surface? Maybe there are just these 2 options. Be a big boy and use Nuage or an Avid S6 or along those lines, or you’re a hobbyist that’s satisfied with some blinking buttons. It’s creativity that counts, not efficiency 
Or is it?
I think the market is just quite small. I’m not sure if you’re aware of WK-Audio’s products before they ceased to make them. They to me seemed very close to an alternative.
This 12-channel controller for example was very good in my opinion. I think the price was around half of a Nuage “piece”, and had full integration with Nuendo/Cubase:
They also had an edit unit as well as a full scale controller closer to the Nuendo. So my point is that with that smaller unit pictured above, if there was a market for us at roughly the price range it was in, why did it fail? My guess is that the market is too small and the overhead and responsibility is too much. Of course that company isn’t Yamaha, so the comparison is a bit unfair, but you get the point.
For what it’s worth I’d love something like the above, or the s3, at a lower price. But I have my doubts that we’ll see it.
As for creativity versus efficiency, my view is that the more efficient I am the cheaper it is for my clients - OR - the more time I can spend on creativity. But that’s really an aside I think.
Yeah I think you’re right. The market is just too small. Another problem is that such a controller in today’s day and age needs to be different things to different people. Some want the faders, others want faders and quick access to EQ and pan. Me, I want to basically replace as much of the mouse and keyboard as I can. I’d like to zoom, move clips around, cut or trim start and tail at lightning speed. This all works with the keyboard and mouse, too, but I don’t want to remember what that shortcut was again. There are just too many strange combinations to remember. Was it now CTRL-G? Or CTRL-ALT-G? Or only SHIFT-G? There are always these few operations where the key command is so deeply buried in modifier keys or in menus that it’s a pain to remember. Dozens of different combinations with the letter G are just not intuitive to remember (Shift, Ctrl, Alt, Shift-Alt, Shift-Ctrl, Ctrl-Alt, Shift-Ctrl-Alt, and then there’s CMD on the Mac).
A controller that has special keys for these operations that I personally need would be really nice. That’s why I was asking about the Nucleus and how the customizing software was. But there is no controller, that’s specific to my workflow of course, it’s just too individual.
So the more I think about it, the more 2 types of controllers make sense. Dedicated controllers like Softube’s Console 1 that does JUST EQ, and nothing else. So when you need EQ, you just turn these dedicated knobs on your desk and you know what they do. And the second thing is like the Avid Pro Tools Dock that uses an iPad where you can freely configure your setup and arrangement of knobs and you can make the control surface anything you want it to be. Dedicated and extremely flexible, customizable touch control that can be freely arranged.
I don’t think the Nucleus is modern in that sense, even with the customization software. There are too many convoluted knobs. It’s basically just a keyboard with a different design. You can assign keys in the software, yes, but those keys on the console itself are static. You also have to press SHIFT keys to get to more functions, or press one key to get to a different mode or submenu, then press another key and then turn a knob. It’s limited as it’s everything in hardware and it has the same feel as a keyboard. You need to remember what submenu, SHIFT and knob combination you assigned to something.
I think if you’re mixing movies or music, a huge mixing desk is really what you need. It has the dedicated knobs in the arrangement that makes the most sense for the task at hand. But if you work on different projects all the time and are an all-in-one studio like me, where you do game sound, voice-over recordings, sound design, film mixes, web videos, e-learning courses, a hardware only surface is the wrong tool I think. Every project has quite different operations you have to do over and over to finish the work. And hardware is specialized too much for a specific task. For me, it’s like eating soup with a fork.
So either I need to jog my memory more and stay with keyboard and mouse and learn all those more complicated shortcuts, customize the shortcuts even more than I already did, or wait and see if more Pro Tools Dock like products get released, where you have the flexibility of a touch device with free arrangement combined with hardware for haptics, that play well together. I think it’s a very interesting engineering and usability problem and I’m interested to see if there is a market for it.
Yeah, I don’t entirely disagree with you. For me it’s mostly a matter of trading that off with ergonomics. Right now in my home studio I’m just using a Faderport for fader moves. I obviously miss having more faders, but the tradeoff is portability as well as a smaller footprint on my workstation. When I see controllers that have integrated everything we want what typically happens is that one of the two - faders or edit section - is in the sweet spot, or both are off-center. I personally don’t care for that all that much. So right now for editing I’m using my keyboard, Kensington trackball, and a Contour Shuttle Pro v2. If you’re annoyed by having to remember commands I can recommend trying a Shuttle out. You can program any key command or macro on any of the keys and they’re also legendable so you can get labels on there. Right now though I’m considering moving back to keyboard/trackball only for the sake of consistency with PT setups.
I agree. The only thing about that sort of arrangement is that we get a workspace that’s a bit “messy” whereas a single device with everything on it is more “neat”. I recently worked on the Digidesign D-Command, even though it’s discontinued, and there’s definitely something to be said for being able to quickly select a channel and just reach out and touch the EQ or dynamics, knowing which knob does what without having to select a bunch of stuff to get the job done. To me that was a very well designed controller, just a bit too big.
I’m leaning towards “less is more” again, simply because I go between studios.
Another option though, which I haven’t investigated yet, is a touch screen monitor. Concerns about consumer grade touch screens include lag as well as no multi-touch (i.e. without Raven or D-Touch software), but I would think that some single-touch functionality would work just fine, like accessing Control Room, the automation panel etc.
I’ve tried this on a small scale on my iPad. Logic has a remote app called Logic Remote, which is about as powerful as EuControl and the PT Control app. It even features nice graphical EQs with touch controls or a MIDI piano to play some notes. In a way, it’s better integrated than a generic protocol could ever be.
But I lack the haptics. You can never blindly reach for a control and turn a knob or move a fader. And so you always have to look in order not to slide away with your finger and lose control. For me personally, that’s why I like a hybrid approach. Configurable display on the tablet computer with customizeable functions, but also hardware controls to feel something. It’s great just concentrating on the sound and adjusting an EQ. Not having to look at a flat screen control trying not to let the knob slip away under the fingers. One thing I also don’t like about touch is the fact that when you touch something, you’re hiding the control under your finger. You don’t see anymore what you’re doing. How fast do I turn this knob? What value is it at right now? And although it’s multi-touch you end up doing the things you would do with your mouse, anyway. At least that was my experience, using the Logic Remote. It works great but I ended up using only the configurable shortcut buttons that saved me remembering obscure key combos.
It’s just a personal preference, but having something to grab, an EQ, where you know it’s always on this knob, is great.
Anyway, Summer NAMM is over right? Was there anything worth talking about?
NAMM? The only new entry of interest was the QCon Icon version 2 Pro X deluxe maximus whateveritscalled. It’s just another HUI/MCU device really.
The one thing I have a hard time with is when new manufacturers make odd design choices despite being late in the game so to speak. The form factor of the Mackie is a bit large now that we’ve got the Avid Artist series. The Artist series (and the s3) are all slim and sleek. They look really nice and don’t take up a lot of space. I think that’s a big part of their success. So looking at the Mackie MCU it’s got general thickness but also an elevated rear where the LCD is. So then these QCon guys come along with a device that sure looks slimmer in terms of height, i.e. it’s thinner it seems, but then they go ahead and raise the back to fit a meter bridge. So now for anyone who wants a computer monitor pretty close and low to this controller the meter bridge forces either the controller to be lower or the monitor to be higher. It seems pretty unnecessary to me, especially since several others have successfully chosen to embed the meters next to the faders, or above, which makes more sense.
The price is also a bit steep. At $999 for 8+1 faders (with expansions available I think) it ends up in Avid Artist land. And at that price point I really don’t see any reason at all to get that controller. I mean, why that one when I can get the same compatibility for Cubase/Nuendo with an Artist AND full integration with Pro Tools?.. At the price of the Behringer X-touch - sure… but not at 1k.
One serious drawback I found with Mackie protocol is the 6 character limit on the scribble strip displays. It makes it very hard to identify channel/parameter names. With Eucon you can have up to something like 12 characters, depending on exactly what characters are used.
I’ve had a Mackie MCU setup in the past, and now a Eucon setup (first Avid Artist and then Avid S3) and I find Eucon to be a lot better/more powerful. There is one big drawback though -when you hide tracks in Cubase, they will still appear on the controller. I’ve figured out quite a good workaround for this using an Autohotkey script but it’s still not a perfect solution.
On the issue of character limits; I’ve found that in order to be working efficiently across OS’, DAWs and controllers the most efficient way of getting that done is to come up with your own abbreviation scheme and then applying that equally across all workstations. So I stopped typing “dialog” long ago and now just write “dg X” where “X” is the number. This way I know for a fact that regardless of DAW track width I can see the name, and the same applies to controllers.
Another thing I did was simply decide to give larger amounts of “audio” larger letters, i.e. all caps. So a dialog track gets “dg” but any group/aux gets “DG”, or “DIA”. This way if I see “music” I know it’s a an audio track and not a group, because the group would be “MUSIC”, and so forth.
I know it’s a workaround, but at least it’s 100% predictable and subject to (my own crappy) logic.
Dude. I wouldn’t call it a workaround at all. A great way to go, regardless of font-accommodating real estate. Do a lot of that sort of thing myself… Hadn’t thought of the “all caps” thing for groups, though. Duh.
Chewy
Do a search for Nucleus … I recall reading a lot of angry posts about SSL not supporting recent OS’s rendering the unit useless for some users.
I got the sense the Nucleus didn’t work out for SSL … though I wanted one really badly. Still do, but not if there’s no support commitment.
Shame if that’s the case.
As far as I’m aware, the compatibility issues only affect the audio interface features of the Nucleus, not the DAW control functionality.