It should come as no surprise to the people that know me that I like the shiny. Especially when it comes to toys that I can use to improve the way I work. At heart I am extremely lazy, it’s true. It’s just that I happen to work really hard to be as lazy as I am. I like my time off and I do my work as fast and as efficiently as I can to be able to relax comfortable in the knowledge that I don’t have any work to do and that I am up to date.

Which leads me to Toy Story 1.

The good old Apple Trackpad.
It took a little getting used to but eventually I got it. Having used a mouse for oh so many years made for an interesting few weeks of learning pressure sense and finger gestures on the trackpad. It helps that I downloaded Better Touch Tool from boastr.de. Gestures can be created at the touch of a trackpad and it’s brilliant. It’s definitely worth a look so my right hand is playing very nicely with the trackpad but let’s move on to Toy Story 2 for the left hand.

This is the Euphonix Transport Controller. Now owned by Avid, it’s an amazing piece of kit. Completely programmable multi-function buttons, jog wheel and shuttle wheel. I programmed about 90% of all the keyboard shortcuts I use ever day into the various buttons on the controller. J,K,L, delete, shift delete, go to end edit, go to end program and vice versa, mark in, mark out, clear in and out, save, render audio, render video, render all, zoom and a whole bunch more. It’s easily programmable and setting can be saved if you work on more than one controller or if like me you take it to every edit suite you work on and load the settings. It does require a software driver download and Avid are very good at keeping it updated for the newer OS version apple brings out every year. I love the old school edit controller action. It reminds me of from whence I came – tape based editing systems. Yes I know, old!
It’s Compatible with FCP and FCPX so that made me happy. Obviously it is Avid compatible as well but unfortunately as at the time of writing this no Premiere Pro support, although you can use it in Adobe Audition.
And that’s a nice segue into Toy Story 3.

The PreSonus FaderPort is a great addition to my DAW. Whether I’m using Logic, Cubase, Adobe Audition or Studio One it works very well indeed. It’s long fader is smooth and responsive and for an old school mix engineer like me it’s perfect. Although it only has one fader it is still extremely powerful as it can control banks of audio channels or groups or busses. In Audition I work with the busses a lot and I assign dialogue, music and fx to separate busses, clean them up and correct levels etc and then use the PreSonus to do a live mix on the music bus or occasionally on the fx bus. Switching between channels is a simple case of pressing a button and it’s all good. Unfortunately there are some limitations to the FaderPort if you are not working in PreSonus Studio One software but there is more than enough functionality on the device to keep you happy.

All in all I would say that combined, these toys have saved me a shite load of time in editing and in mixing which gives me a lot more time to be lazy and watch the latest TV or read a book or learn a new skill.. But that is for another time.

Hope you enjoyed. Till much later
Peace, love and vomit
Jayce