The shape of it
Two columns never move: the pages down the left and the master on the right. Only the strips slide sideways between them, so the sum is the one thing that is always in front of you.
Above the strips lies the timeline. The header says what the desk is doing: the transport, the clock, the marker. The line under the desk says what the mix and the program are.
The six pages
A strip is taller than any screen, and most of the time you are working on one thing. Two pages show the whole strip. Four show one section of it.
- MINThe whole strip, cut to the control you reach for.
- ALLEvery section, with every control on it.
- INTape, trim and polarity.
- EQThe cut filters and the four bands.
- DYNCompressor and gates.
- FXThe sends to the effect channels.
Pages never change the mix. A section that is off the page is still in the signal path. You are choosing what to look at, not what to hear.
A page key always puts the strips up, wherever you were standing. That is how you come back from the rack and from the track list.
Three views that are not pages
- The rack, and back
- The buses and the effect channels on their own, and back
- The track list, and back
- Show one group of strips on its own
- The whole desk again
These three toggle, where a page key does not: asking for the view you are already in can only mean you want out of it.
leaves the receiving side standing: the buses, with the VCAs and the effect channels after them. The summing side can then be worked on without the material in the way. to show one group of strips on its own. In every case the strips that left the screen are still playing, and the line under the desk says so.
Pick first, then act
Click a strip's name plate to pick it, and the keyboard talks to what you picked. The mouse is the other way around: it points at the one control under the pointer, unless you tell it otherwise with .
- Click a name plate: this strip, and let go of the rest.
- ⌘-click: add one, or take one out, and keep the others.
- ⇧-click: everything from the strip you last touched to this one.
- Click and sweep across the plates with the button down: everything the pointer crosses, on top of what you had already picked. This is how you take a drum kit: press on the first plate, drag across the rest, let go.
- Hold a plate still for a moment and the strips lift: now you are sorting, and they shuffle under the pointer as you move. Grab one of a picked set and the whole set travels with it.
- Double-click a plate to rename. commits and opens the next name down the desk. Fourteen names to fix is fourteen names and one hand.
Both name plates, above the meter and below the fader, are the same name, and either will do. A strip you cannot see is never picked.
- Let goThe panel that is up, or failing that the strips you picked.
Working a control
Every knob, fader, pan and send works the same way.
- Drag up and down to set it. Sideways for pan.
- ⇧ while dragging for a five times finer throw.
- Double-click to put it home: a fader to unity, a pan to the centre, a send off, a knob to where the desk sits with that section out of the way.
- Hover it to read it. A knob's label turns into its value while the pointer is on it, and goes back when you leave.
Settings are shown on demand. Levels are always up. The meters, the fader's dB and the gain reduction stay written, because they say what the desk is doing rather than what it is set to.
One gesture on several strips
Pick the strips, hold ⌘, and the gesture you make on one of them is made on all of them. A fader, any knob, a switch, a double-click home.
- A drag moves them all by the same amount, not to the same level. Three faders spread over 12 dB keep their spacing. Pull the set down and the strips that reach the bottom wait there. Bring it back up and every one returns to exactly where it started.
- ⌘⇧ is the same thing, finely.
- Everything that is not a drag follows the control you pressed. Press one strip's EQ in and the picked strips all come in with it. Step a switch and they all land on the same position.
- The gesture has to start on a strip you picked. ⌘ on a strip that is not in the selection reaches that strip alone, so a ⌘ held out of habit can never cross the desk.
It works on the fader, the pan, the sends, the trim, the tape, the EQ's bands and cuts, the compressor, both gates, the dirt, the mono maker, the polarity, and in the track list, on the OUT cell that says where a strip goes. There is nothing to gang on the master, the rack or an effect channel: the desk has one of each.
Two doors that do not look like buttons
- The little EQ curve on the strip opens the big graph. Put the pointer on it and it says GRAPH.
- IN ST in a strip's head opens the channels panel, where you choose which channels of a stereo file that strip takes. Under the pointer the words become CHANNELS.
Neither is a button, because a row of buttons is room every strip on the desk would have to pay for.
Scrolling
- The wheel over a strip scrolls that strip's sections, and every channel strip moves with it, so the bands stay in one row across the desk.
- ⇧ and the wheel, or a sideways gesture on a trackpad, slides the desk itself. The pages and the master never move.