A friend I collaborate with a fair amount is talking about starting a quad project and we’re looking at setting it up so that he plays his Eurorack setup and feeds me a few different outputs from that, and then I process them, mostly spacial/panning type stuff. Since live quad panning on a standard mixer is a pain (especially since I don’t have a mixer with subgroups anymore, got rid of that when I moved back to ITB mixing a few years ago and regret it now) and even the most inexpensive dedicated quad panning hardware is out of our budget right now, the obvious first step is to use the OT for all of the panoramic stuff, with the main outs driving the front pair of powered speakers and the cue outs driving the rear pair.
I already have plenty of ideas but I’d love to hear how anyone else who does this sort of thing approaches it. Mods, feel free to merge this with the other quad thread if you think that’s more appropriate.
I have been thinking just yesterday about exactly that setup! Please keep us posted how it works out!
My first question was: How to automate panning and manipulate live as well - I have a few XY Livid Instrument expansion boxes …though the knob snaps back to center… but should work for recording automations.
And there is of course TouchOSC / Lemur which should be perfect for panning (and MIDI Feedback)
I won’t be able to actually get started for a while since I don’t have any options for monitoring in quad, so right now I’m just coming up with a game plan.
As far aouadditional controllers we have basically no money to spend on this (we might try to get a grant fsmallset of powered speakers at some point next year, but for now it’s going to be down to pooling our monitors when we practice and hopefully being able to borrow speakers when the time comes to start performing) but I have an Axoloti, so I will probably get a couple of small analog sticks and maybe some faders, and build a custom MIDI controller that way. Tracks 1-4 will be dedicated to front channels and 5-8 to rear channels, so mapping a joystick so the X axis controls balance on both the front and rear tracks while the Y axis controls amplitude from 0 to 127 on the front tracks and 127 to 0 on the rear is all I’d need to have manual quad panning. maybe 8 buttons channel assignment (so for example button 1 would assign joystick 1 to send CC on the control channels for tracks 1 and 5 at the same time, button 2 for tracks 2 and 6, and then buttons 5-8 would assign the same 4 pairs of tracks to joystick 2, all on the fly with the possibility of assigning one joystick to multiple channels and provisions in place to make it impossible to assign both joysticks to the same channels at the same time - pretty straightforward).
So if you want rear to front automation you’d need midi tracks no?
Correct me if I’m wrong, you’d also need opposite values for Track Level and CUE Level, so I was thinking about a midi processor.