Bachelor Thesis: Ableton controllers

My Bachelor Thesis (2017) was about designing a new type of DAW controller, which would exceed the limitations of current standard MIDI controllers by communicating directly with the DAW, rather than formatting the information in a 0 to 127 range and letting the DAW interpret the actions. One advantage of not using MIDI is that any type of information can be send between the units and the DAW. To illustrate, the units are aware in real time what plug-in on what channel is selected and adapt their actions to it (range, user-defined parameter sensitivity, etc). This was labelled “All Follows Mouse Approach”, as one no longer needs to map every parameter, as this is done in real time by the units. A second advantage is that the information is relative, avoiding jumps or the need to match the current parameter value. Hardware-wise this is done by endless rotary encoders instead of potentiometers and a touch-strip instead of faders.

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Main unit (Session Controller) capabilities:

A) Channel control: channel level, mute, solo, arm, control over sends, next/previous channel, panning, magic knob auto-mapping to the currently selected parameter.

B) Session control: record enable, create marker, 3 dim positions, ctrl, shift, alt, view switch, play/pause/continue playback, loop, render track, save session.

C) Editing: edit, fade, zoom in/out, scrub left/right

D) Classical shortcuts working for editing and mixing: copy, paste, cut, duplicate, undo/redo, delete

The unit’s drivers provide additional functions to Ableton: unmute/unsolo/unarm all tracks, send manager.

EQ Unit (EQator) capabilities:
A) For each EQ channel: Frequency, shape, gain, channel on/off, Q,
B) Entire EQ plug-in: A switch to control channel 1-4 or 4-8 (two units can be combined to control 8 channels simultaneously).
output level/dry/wet and plug-in bypass

Dynamics Unit (DYNamite) capabilities: adapts to the type of currently used plugin (single/multi band compressor, gate, expander)
Ratio, Input gain, attack, release, threshold, multiple cross-overs, multiple knees, band solo, dry/wet, bypass, make-up gain and a switch to change the stage or the band depending on the plug-in.

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