I have been an Avid Artist user for many years and still enjoy the Artist series. In fact, the Artist Transport is the best I have ever used on any system period. I recently bought myself an SSL UC1 as a birthday present with low expectations. as it turns out, it is fantastic, at least I think so. It is so much fun playing with what looks and feels like a genuine SSL channel strip. Not only that, but I’m paying much more attention to EQ than I usually do because the controller feels so ‘right’. So full marks for this novel device. What’s more, because it is driven by Cubase plugins, there are no interface/protocol issues that I have found.
So excited was I that I ran out and bought a UF1. A terrible disappointment in all respects, not least of which due to the brittleness and age of the Mackie protocol. I sit here typing feeling so grateful to be sitting behind my Avid controllers happily running Eucon with Cubase. My recommendation is to find a used Avid Artist 'Control ’ and ‘Transport’ and go as deep as you want into the Cubase stack . You can pick them up for a few hundred bucks on Reverb.
Is there a way to show meters on the embedded screen on the Artist Control?
Also, is it possible to slip / trim events with the jog wheel?
Some AVID videos show that this is possible within Pro Tools, I wonder if this works with Cubase as well (I did get a taste of that with DaVinci Resolve and their Speed Editor and this is a great workflow enhancer)/
There are four strips ‘visible’ to the touchscreen, each with their own metering. These correspond to the four faders on the Control. You can use EU Control (the Avid middleware) to assign any cubase channel to each of the four strips and make them sticky, or just use the track or bank switches to riffle through channels. You can trim and move objects using the jog wheel. Not only that, but you can program the Jog wheel using EU Control to perform a wide variety of tasks from scrub, jog, select, volume, vertical or horizontal scroll. The other great thing I should have mentioned about the Avid Control is that is is fully integrated with Cubase Control room (including a dedicated volume knob and push to mute) which is a feature you can only get on a Eucon controller
After fiddling a bit with the Artist Control (minus the touch screen :)) and the Control app, it seems that while Mackie Protocol and MIDI Remote have their limitations, EUCON also is not as fully featured as I thought, unless I am missing something?
Some things that I am able to map either with the Generic MIDI Remote or with the newer MIDI Remote, I have not found a way to do it with EUCON, as it seems only key commands are available and not other functions such “Control Room” or “VST Mixer”.
For instance, I have not found a way yet to select the source on the phone channel in the Control Room?
That’s not really an issue as I’m planning to use both the P1-M and the Artist Control, but at the moment my “Control Room” panel on the EUCON is far less featured than the one I have one the P1-M.
Looks like there is no such thing as the perfect control surface unfortunately
On my example withe the Phone channel in the Control Room I can access those functions on the MIDI Remote, which so far I haven’t found on EUControl - click, switch sources, etc.:
Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not the device of Eucontrol’s fault. The way Cubase exposes things is so different depending on how you access them - MCU, Generic Remote, MIDI Remote, key commands. Its seems each is able to do some things the others can’t.
I think that’s true. I also think that it’s likely that a lot of things get missed when we search for them simply because the labels are just different in the different protocols. So while Steinberg may have name for a function and the category it belongs to Eucon might have a different nomenclature. Steinberg won’t and probably shouldn’t change its naming conventions and neither will/should Avid. So in those cases functions exist but are just hard to find.
I’ll also just mention that one thing I’ve been trying to do bit by bit is “remap” my key commands to Eucon commands on my tablet. By doing that it frees up the actual Cubendo key commands to be used for something else. And that’s one way of getting more out of Eucon - by simply taking functions and triggering them by key commands in Cubendo and then assigning that in Eucon using key strokes rather than the commands directly. It ends up being the same as typing on the keyboard, but on a tablet it’s labeled, color coded and organized in a more convenient way.
Yes I have watched a couple videos on that. I still have to grasp how much factory mappings SSL is providing for third party plugins.
I am quite happy with the way EUCON handles plugins. But then I am not complaining about the MCU plugin handling. But I did spend some time customizing each of my plugins MIDI Remote mapping to arrange parameters to my liking (like always having the compressors mix knob on the bottom right pot, etc.). I guess if you use more than a handful of plugins this can be tedious.
One thing I find disappointing on MCU is that the push of the VPot cannot really be mapped in Cubase - so you end up wasting pots for things that really should be mapped to the push button instead. Like bypass, phase, or EQ in / COMP in / GATE in on an SSL plugin.
Mind you, the same thing happens on EUCON but then you get 2 buttons associated with each pot so you can really use pots where it makes sense.
Cubase’s MCU EQ implementation (the 1-page version) does make a good use of push buttons, so you can control the 4 EQ bands with just 8 pots as you access Q and band on/off by the push button. I wish more plugins allowed you to do that.
This is what I’m doing at the moment but using key commands instead of key strokes. I am always worried that key strokes may be sent to other applications (although EUCON prevents that, so that’s just me).
I am organizing key commands by page as you mention and that’s really handy to group all control room commands on the same page. Also the concept of bottom page (mapped to physical buttons) and middle page on the Artist Control and in the app is great, especially when coupled with the ability to map multiple commands to a single button.
EUcontrol is not the best app for soft keys mapping although I guess once you’re done, you’re done. But it lacks cut and paste functions for button settings, etc.
Yeah I totally agree. It’s actually a pain in the a##. I just bumped a topic on the Avid forum and the request for them to improve the GUI is several years old. They said they’d work on it and improve it but here we are. Like you said, hopefully one can plan reasonably well ahead and set up just once… hopefully…
