USB DAW Controller for Ardour

Is there a list somewhere of DAW controllers that work with Ardour?

For EXAMPLE:

  • Icon P1-Nano?
  • SSL UF8

Are there any recommendations?
I’m mainly interested in no longer having to operate EQs and faders with a mouse.

Anything that uses Mackie Control (and there are a lot) will work fine.

Operating EQs is more problematic though, since Ardour has no builtin EQs and it is therefore not possible for there to be “automatic” bindings between controls on the device and some arbitrary EQ plugin that you added to one or more tracks.

I mostly use the Harrison Channel plug-ins as EQ.

Is there a solution for this?

EQing with mouse is very … well, let’s say … unintuitive.

You can certainly navigate to the plugin controls on any reasonably capable Mackie Control compatible device.

But which plugin? In Ardour that’s undefined. A track may have an EQ, may have no EQ, may have an EQ as the first plugin, may have it as the Nth plugin … may have an EQ that isn’t an EQ in the convention sense.

I doubt that uses of the incredible Fabfilter or many or graphical parametric EQs would agree with you.

Too bad. FabFilter plugins are great, I mainly use the compressors from them.

I think if Harrison released a DAW controller for under 1000 EUR for their MixBus DAW - and MixBus is nothing more than a rebuilt Ardour, isn’t it? - then I would go for it.
Maybe you can pass that on!

I mentioned fabfilter because their EQ seems to me to be expressly designed to be lovely to use with a mouse (though it can be used without one also).

Mixbus is an entirely different story. Because the EQ is built in, it’s easy to make controllers attach automatically to the EQ controls (within certain limits).

Mixbus is a lot more than a rebuilt Ardour.

Harrison have considered building a control surface, but the economics of it do not currently make a lot of sense.

I’ve used many different control surfaces - I currently have an Icon V1-M in front of me - but the specific goal you’re trying to reach (direct control of “the EQ”) is non-trivial in a DAW that has no builtin EQ.

Finally, I should mention that we try hard to avoid the use of the word “unintuitive” around here, because it is basically meaningless.

I think I’ll have a look at the FabFilter EQs and also the SSL EQs, because there’s a control for them:

[LEFT]SSL UC1[/LEFT][LEFT][/LEFT]

Okay, I think I understand what you mean. I’m now over 50 and during my training as a sound engineer in the 90s I was still sitting at analogue Neve and SSL consoles and recording with 24-track tape machines. Even though I haven’t been professionally active in this business for almost 20 years, but only work on my own stuff in my home recording studio, this ‘analogue approach’ has simply become second nature to me.
One of the reasons I like Ardour is that it works in a similar way to ProTools, which I also know from the past.

Man is a creature of habit … :wink:

I have now spoken to the experts at Thomann on the phone. They said that the Softube Console 1 Channel Mk III should also work for most plug-ins. I’m going to go there and have a look.

Is there anyone here who uses the Softube Console 1 Channel Mk III with Ardour and can tell me about their experiences?

@MichaelSchramm Dunno if you’ve looked at it already, but Russell Cottier builds a range of Mixbus-specific controllers:

https://rucoproaudio.com/shop/

Tres.

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