Sat Mar 28, 2020 6:28 pm
I have now bought a Korg Nanokontrol2, which does exactly what I wanted, did not require installing any drivers and was really quite cheap. It has eight sliders, eight knobs, 24 buttons, and also a series of buttons arranged for controlling a recording system. Hauptwerk recognises the controls very easily. I now have a volume control, a way of adjusting the amount of reverb for a given mixer preset without having to reprogram the preset, and for the more recent 6-channel organs with wet and dry front channels as well as rear surround channels I can set up a simple slider to control the wet/dry mix and another one for the surround volume. This is much easier and more precise than using a touch screen.
Hint: Where there are separate on-screen sliders for wet and dry volume, you can assign both to the same physical slider using auto-detect, then by right-clicking on one of the sliders you can adjust the settings manually and you simply tick the box to reverse the response. That way as you move the physical slider forward and back you are turning the wet channel up and the dry one down simultaneously, or vice versa.
I have yet to work out the best use for most of the controls. Tuning and speed fo recorder playback immediately come to mind. They will also control a swell box or a crescendo pedal system if you don't have enough physical swell pedals on your console.
One further bonus is that in the course of researching these MIDI controllers on the Internet, I came across a completely unrelated use, which is editing photographs. Somebody has written some software to translate between a MIDI controller and Adobe Lightroom, which is a powerful photo editor that I use all the time (I have been taking photographs seriously for nearly 50 years), the idea being that having physical controls is much easier and more precise than clicking and dragging sliders on screen. The Korg device isn't optimal for this, but there is an even cheaper one by Behringer which suits Lightroom quite well, and there are overlays available with all the function assignments so that you can see at a glance which knob or button does what. I am looking forward to trying this out, and if it speeds up my workflow it will be the cheapest piece of photographic equipment I have ever bought.
So thank-you, Keith, for pointing me in the right direction.