How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

Curious how much people find this useful for plugins.

Does anyone use it with a channel strip plugin?

I have mix+dock and generally find that while I love the setup for everything else, I don't find it to be that useful for plugins. Too many pages, weird parameter mapping and lack of custom mapping all leave me reaching for the mouse (or mouse+trackpad for eq's). I've demo'd an S3 and generally felt the same, but was curious if that was also me not being familiar with it.

I picked up a Softube Console1 a while back, and really like the workflow of it, of course it would be great to have channel linking, but even as-is, I find it more useful than trying to edit anything with more than a few parameters on the Dock.

It seems at this point that custom mapping isn't something that anyone should assume is in the pipeline...The S3 would have plenty of knobs/faders/buttons to be an awesome channel strip controller, especially with a Dock. I could see mapping everything to Plugin Alliance channel strips or would be really amazing if we could store channel presets + mapping to multiple plugins. But it seems like all that is a pipe dream at this point.

Re: How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

I use the s3 all the time for plugins. Top row EQ, bottom row whatever plug in or send I have to flip to faders. What I don't use for plug ins is the dock.

Re: How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

I'm the other way around. Plug-in tweaking on the Dock is fast and intuitive. You can see three additional pages while you're on one. I only occasionally use the top row of knobs on my S3. More often I'll flip plug-ins to the faders.

Re: How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

I suppose if most of your plugins have 16 or less parameters then then there is no paging to get to all the parameters on S3.

But I agree in general that the iPad on dock displaying all 32 parameters in center of screen for easy access is a beautiful thing.

I also like using the Dock when inserting plugins because I can see all the plugin categories on one screen.

Re: How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

Thanks everyone.

Anyone specifically getting a good workflow going with something like the plugin alliance channel strip, or waves channel strip plugins etc?

Re: How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

Is it possible to custom map plugin parameters to faders on the S3? Like the D-command/D-Control can do?

Re: How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

It is possible on Cubase/Nuendo. Not sure about Pro Tools but I think it's not possible.

Re: How much do you use your S3 for plugins?
 

I use my S3 for plugin control with relatively simple plugins. e.g. It's perfect for adjusting Threshold/Ratio/Attack/Release/Gain on a compressor but for super in depth plugins with dozens of parameters I would use the mouse. I guess for anything that fits on one page of the S3 I will use the controller.

It helps hugely if you can rearrange the plugin parameters. e.g. any time I open a compressor plugin, knob 1 is always Threshold, knob 2 is always Ratio etc. This makes it much more intuitive.