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Encoders vs Pots


elemental
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Hello peeps

i've seen this discussed before, so forgive me if i'm flogging a dead horse (or whatever)

But, I am currently designing an Ableton Live controller, 16 channel mixer style with around 5 pots per channel for fx sends + hi and low cut filters.

My reason for going for pots is simplicity: I'm fed up of doing switching during performances (I currently use 2xFaderfox LV-1 and a BCR-2000) .... Also encoders need LED rings so u can see what the value is, which seems a little compliacted for me. I want it to be as simple to build as possible. However, i've seen others praise encoders as always worth doing over pots. The advantage is I could control many more parameters via switching.. even though i'm trying to avoid this, its ok to do it for rare occasions, like an fx send which is only used a few times in the set.

If anyone has experience with this I'd really like to hear about it.

BTW big thanks to Thorsten and everyone who contributes here, I am getting quite excited about this project!!

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For things that you only use from time to time, you could use a jogwheel and a menu...

Do you really need LED rings? Doesn't the value of the encoder get shown on the computer screen anyway?

But it sounds to me like all your controls will work well as absolute controllers so at the end of the day, it's best to do what fits your needs best, not what everyone else needs :)

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Hi,

I working on a "Live" controller to, and have been faced with the same problem. I can't be bothered dealing LED ring and I'm trying to design my controller so each control only has one function. Because of that pot's are seeming like the best choice. At the start of my set the controller will always set to the default and change from there, so having pots really isn't a problem.

I've been disussing these and a few other issuses with Stryd_one in this thread:

http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php?topic=6496.0

Have a look to get a little more detail about my thoughts

Rowan

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Throwing in my 2 cents, it depends on how much you can keep track of in your head, and how good you are of double-checking your instrumentation. When doing live performance, I like things to be single function, because you need to be watching and analyzing the floor, not LCD's and whether this bank of buttons is in mode 1,2, or 3.

Pots with stops do well in this situation.

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