We have been following music producer Stuart McCredie’s journey search for a control surface solution that works for him.  We last reported on his journeys in November 2014  Since then he has tried a number of ideas and seriously looked at flight casing a small S6 before deciding that was going to be too large and heavy for him. In the meantime Avid had been fine tuning the S3 as a controller for Pro Tools and so Stuart decided to revisit it for the 3rd time. Stuart takes up the story...

With the S6 I would've had 16 faders & 40 knobs where as the S3 provides 16 faders & 32 knobs. With the S3 I will miss out on the centre section but with the addition of the Pro Tools Control App a lot of the S6 centre section features (like recalling layouts) are set to appear for the S3.

I was curious as to what had caused him to change his mind yet again about the S3. He told me…

Most of the things that annoyed me have been addressed. Plug-in parameters generally appear in the same knob region. I may add an Artist Transport, but like everybody else I have been using a qwerty keyboard for decades. I should just get over the lack of a set of physical transport controls on the S3 & move on, after all you can use the Touchstrip if you want to.

I've just mixed a couple of songs for a movie & the sessions were pretty big with 2 drums kits, full percussion, band, choir & orchestra. I actually ran out of voices on my HDX card for the first time!  With sessions this big it is virtually impossible to move around the session quickly with just a keyboard & mouse. I did it with 11 layouts on the S3 and I reckon it saved me at least least half a day of scrolling around looking for specific tracks. I definitely mixed quicker too, not even looking at the screen when setting levels. This is my bugbear with touch screens, because there is no tactile feedback, you have to look to check whether you have pressed the button and that slows you up.

On the iPad app, you get 40 tracks on screen to select directly and the colour coded bar at the top allows you to navigate to groups of tracks with consummate ease. I had issues with Eucon 3.3 & PT 11.3.2 not working with the app but I have just upgraded to Eucon 3.3.1 & everything in working now.

So it seems that Stuart’s journey looking for a control surface is over…

If I end up setting up another facility then I'd go for a 16 fader M40 S6 with room to add a further 16 faders. Not remotely portable, but after looking closely at the S6 it's about as good as it gets (having owned a CS3000 & D Control probably explains it). The S3 is the next best thing, it is portable, feels beautifully built, and has the bonus of some I/O when I am on the road. I don't see how Avid could've condensed the S6 feature set and implemented it any better than they now have on the S3.