Recording - February 2010 - 22

Euphonix MC Control I primarily used the MC Control for its automated faders and transport control and didn’t worry too much about the touch screen. I quickly became accustomed to having this control surface under my hands. About 10 seconds into using the MC Control I was using the transport controls and slider banks almost exclusively. The mix came off seamlessly, and I prepared myself for the bigger session to follow. The next project was a seven-day mixing marathon, featuring a solo musician that I enjoy working with. Most of his songs represented 20 to 30 tracks, and the session files provided by the tracking engineer were a mess. I had to spend a day on housekeeping, using the MC Control to help set up layout of tracks and a very basic starting mix. In doing this basic track work, I found that having only four sliders was rather limiting. On these large sessions, I found myself spending a lot of time either nudge-nudge-nudging my way across the mix environment or selecting tracks solely to move the sliders into their correct position. Luckily for me, Euphonix also sent a pair of MC Mix surfaces for me to test in my mix system, both of which set up and went to work with equal ease (see the sidebar). This provided me with up to 20 sliders; due to limitations in my workspace I settled on using the MC Control with a single MC Mix surface—giving me 12 sliders to work with. As I became more comfortable with the MC Control, I started taking greater advantage of the touch screen and soft-controls. Working in this way was kind of trippy, because I found myself having to spend a fair amount of time looking to the MC Control’s touch screen to figure out a control’s function. However, as I got more comfortable with the surface, I found myself preferring the efficient controls provided on the MC Control’s touch screen, and started performing fewer functions with the mouse and keyboard. As I’ve discussed in a previous article, working with a control surface can produce much more organic mixes. By weaning myself from mouse mixing and using more control-surface Combining the MC Control with multiple MC Mix units As mentioned in the review, I was provided with two MC Mix units that I could network into the EuControl system to create a massive, 20-slider mixing system. (A full setup can include one MC Control and up to four MC Mix units, plus the new MC Transport smart transport controller, as shown in the impressive photo above.) To test this monster rig, I needed to go beyond the standard Ethernet connections on my desktop computer; I grabbed a Linksys router, set it up as my network hub and connected all three MC devices, and all of my studio’s Macs, to it.RECORDING FEBRUARY 2010 To say it was “plug-and-play” would almost be an understatement. This system is designed for bonehead-proof operation, and worked within seconds. The EuControl software immediately recognized the devices, and set them up in a pretty logical fashion (even splitting up the two MC Mix units to be left and right of the MC Control unit). Logic immediately recognized the new layout and I was able to massive-mix right out of the box. I can’t imagine a more streamlined way of working with large-format controllers—by staying in the middle of the action, the EuControl software does a great job of removing hardware hassles from the setup process.—DDG

Recording - February 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - February 2010