Review: Avid Artist MC Control v2
EUCON is allowed in the same stable as ICON, now that Avid owns Euphonix. And with over 500 new features, it makes the Artist Control a savvy option for all DAW users not just ProTools incumbents.
27 September 2012
Review: Brent Heber
Euphonix released the Artist Control a few years ago. At the time it was well received but had one major flaw — the EUCON protocol it used for more advanced operation was seen as competition with Digidesign’s ICON products, so ProTools didn’t support it. So what use is a lovely controller if it’s ‘crippled’ in the DAW adopted by a majority of professionals? It struck me as a bit of an orphan as it seemed designed from the Euphonix ‘post-centric’ point of view, but worked at its best in things like Logic. Yes, Nuendo was around and Euphonix partnered up with Steinberg to get that working well but let’s face it, Nuendo doesn’t quite have the market share in this neck of the woods.
So when Avid bought Euphonix and their EUCON protocol things started looking up for these little boards. ProTools 9 was the first release to include any EUCON support and PT10, with the latest EUCON drivers, brought over 500 new features to EUCON, super-charging the Artist series as much as it benefited their high-end System 5 professional consoles (mainly used in film and TV mixing) which also communicate over EUCON.
REPLACING AN ICON
The thing is, I bought an ICON D Command. I spent big money on a big console for my studio and now this little upstart comes along, for under two grand, and they’ve retro-fitted a massive chunk of what was once uniquely ICON territory into it! I mean, how dare they! So I bought one for home and I’m only just scratching the surface of what this thing can do.
Think of a menu item in your favourite DAW that you use all the time — would you like to put it on a button? Simple. The touch panel on the Artist Control comes up with banks of buttons. There are over 100 pages of functions taken from the software and put onto clearly legible buttons pre-organised for you with room for you to add your own favourites into ‘user screens’. Mine filled up with automation functions from my ICON so they are right next to the faders for mixing, making me feel right at home.
Not only can you arrange your favourite controls onto user pages on the touch screen, the EUCON software also allows you to add macros. A macro is like a recipe for repetitive tasks. If you work in promos or bounce down lots of grabs within a session it can be laborious to double click on them all and label them all, so I programmed a little macro to go to and select the next region and open the rename function. This keeps my fingers on the keyboard and controller and away from the mouse, unless it’s absolutely necessary.
NEED TO KNOW
OUT OF LINE
The Artist Control is up to Revision 2, which most folks put down as a cosmetic refresh, to rebrand it under the Avid monicker. However, on comparing the earlier unit with the current one, the touch panel seems easier to read with a higher contrast and the faders feel a little bit nicer.
Of course, no product is without its problems. The one that has bugged me from the first moment I laid eyes on the Artist series was why the faders on the mix unit don’t line up with the faders on the control unit. A solution is to put the mix expansion on the right hand side of the control unit and the (debatable) design flaw is less obvious to you and your clients.
You may wonder why you’d want to separate out four faders? Another powerful feature of the system is its ‘Layouts’ ability. You can select faders on the controller and then choose any fader from your ProTools mix and hard assign it, or lock it in place on the controller. This is particularly handy with things like sub masters or VCAs. You can also assign a fader as a type of ‘focus fader’ like on an ICON, where any channel you select in ProTools will automatically popup on that fader. The flaw in the Layouts function is that it seems to reside somewhere in the ProTools session document that you can’t get to — in that layouts can’t be imported or exported between sessions or most critically saved into templates. Hopefully this oversight will be fixed up by Avid soon.
The other issue I had was getting the darn thing to work reliably. Although all the documentation says ‘plug and play with DHCP networking’, I had to assign a static IP to my laptop to finally get the unit to work consistently, without dropouts. Now, fingers crossed, it seems rock solid.
EUCON IN TOUCH
Of course, being the big ProTools geek that I am, I was testing this unit in that context with all the new EUCON features, however the Artist series is supported with lots of other DAWs and the touch panel will even let you program single button macros for things like your Finder/Explorer which could be extremely handy.
If you are a ProTools user and didn’t pay much attention to the Artist Control when it was first released, they are now definitely worth a look. The massive integration upgrade between ProTools and EUCON has really turned what was once a crippled HUI device into a budget ICON controller. Couple that with Avid bringing the price down close to half what it used to be locally and I’m gobsmacked more people aren’t snatching these things up for every edit suite.
RESPONSES