Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

Hello all,

I just became the music technology instructor at a technical institute. I am now in charge of upgrading the school studio and I'd love to create a touch screen mixer.

I looked into the slate digital rave, but because of the price point I am trying not to buy that. After some research I came up with the following plan. I was going to run a Mac M1 Ultra studio and have a tv monitor screen with a touch screen frame on top. This would work but I am running into an issue. Pro Tools does not allow multitouch.

This lead me to finding D Touch, but then came the problem of compatibility with Pro Tools 12 and the M1. With that all out of the way, does anyone know of an alternative software that can make pro tools multi touch? Thanks!

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

I suspect if you are teaching Pro Tools that it's best to stick within what students most commonly will see deployed... which for many may be just displays and doing stuff with the mouse and keyboard shortcuts (get them Pro Tools keyboards in classes/labs to help them get started with shortcuts). They *have* to learn that, and then control surfaces really should use Avid Eucon, from Pro Tools Control running on iPads to S1 EUCON control surfaces on up. But hopefully you can avoid or delay until a suitable time introduce stuff like control surfaces that might gets in the way of students learning the fundamentals. I've seen people come out of using an Avid C24 in classes for example and they thought the thing was doing mixing *in* the console and had their brains completely in a twist. Confusion like that was just terrible to see. And reach out to Avid about programs and academic pricing on control surfaces etc. I'd also be sure I was buying from a vendor with a top reputation for stable/reliable support as an instructor you can't handle downtime or hassles of dealing with vendors all the time to get their stuff to work. Which, cough, is not Slate, IMNSHO.

And are you going to be paid for your time to do all the setup and ongoing support for all this stuff you buy? Or is there an IT group with some Pro Tools etc. skills who will help support this, and say properly setup/configure Ethernet dedicated point to point networks for EUCON? Just do not assume this is a zero ongoing effort thing. Do you have Macs set up that students come along and use right? They are not bringing in their laptops and then hoping all this stuff works OK? Do you need to develop additional courseware for the control surfaces? Or change existing courseware? (the answer is yes :-)). Check with what Avid has available already.

If on new Apple silicon systems you will need to be teaching on Pro Tools Studio or Ultimate running 2022.5 or later.

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

10 point multi touch is one of the reasons to consider the Raven

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

I'd spend the cash on a control surface instead. Teach them how much better using a tactile fader to mix is compared to a mouse or a touchscreen (which are horrible for riding volume/writing automation). Touchscreens are great for functions and menus and macros though, could look at an S1 plus control app on an ipad or tablet.

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

I agree with Darryl. Pro Tools is primarily a keyboard & mouse driven software, and that's what they'll find in all studios when they go to find work. Get the students proficient on just keyboard & mouse, and then move them on to a Eucon surface *after they've learned the keyboard*.

If they're dependent on a touchscreen, they'll be completely stuck when they get into pretty much any studio in the world. And if they're dependent on the Eucon, they'll be stuck in 75% of studios. Keyboard & mouse skills are the mother tongue of PT.

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

Hi you guys,

I definitely do agree that ProTools knowledge should be a top priority first as far as mouse and keyboard shortcuts. I will be instructing the students at the ProTools 100 level. I know I am young but in my own personal experience I really haven’t enjoyed using the DAW controllers. They honestly pulled me away from using keyboard shortcuts and just ended up taking more time in my workflow.

However I really did enjoy the ProTools iPad app and that’s what I ended up using as a controller for a couple of years. I mostly just used it to control my mixes with the faders using multitouch and that’s kind of what I was thinking about doing with my students. Most studios that I’ve been to have these big elaborate mixing consoles that at the end of the day are only use for monitoring a session or you end up skipping over it and using a mouse and keyboard anyway. I just thought, why not allow for the tactile experience if a student wants to do that? I imagine several students running that studio so a multitouch system would allow a few hands to work the “board” at once. My train of thought is that everything is going to go into ProTools to be mixed and edited anyway so why not just interface with ProTools directly? As you stated I want there to be as little confusion as possible with these students and I believe that a mixer or control surface could get too complicated. With the touch screen the “mixer” will look the same as it does in pro tools, not to mention the plug in and mid control capabilities.


To explain to you my program a little bit more I’m going to be teaching high schoolers at a technical institute the 100 level of ProTools music production and other recording techniques in a studio that needs a lot of love. The school has told me to come up with a budget to update and modernize the studio. I’ve went over a lot of different control surfaces and I thought the touchscreen would make the most financial and logical sense. I am not being paid for my time to come up with the solution, but I will be paid during the school year. There is a full IT department that I will be working with to wire everything correctly. I’m just more so focusing on the items that will go in. And I was looking to run ProTools ultimate on an M1 Mac studio.

I guess the main thing I’m looking for is compatibility for multi touch with ProTools. It seems that only raven and d touch will do this. However I recently found out that d touch will not work with the M1 chip. Do you guys have any other ideas for software or hardware that would make pro tools multi touch?

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

You came here an asked,, so you might to read and consider as opposed to Ya-butting ...... being "Young" (your words) your experience is then logically limited and largely anecdotal and thus may not be the optimum measure for a corse of action..... just saying ???

Have to agree with the consensus here
Mouse and keyboard is what is used in probably 99 % of commercial studio's then Large to medium consoles .. And that is not likely to change for decades
The one definite value of working on a mixing console is that it is in fact the GUI design concept that Pro Tools is based one.... again consider it is the design and workflow concept PT is based on :eek:

And It's very simple to use a touch screen after using mouse and keyboard and mixer ..
The other way around ? Not so much

As an instructor at a high school IMO the students would way better off with Mouse and keyboard a medium to small size mixing console, and then some iPads to get the touch experience ................

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

Having gone down this rabbit hole myself, I'll offer my 2 cents:o

If you REALLY want touchscreens, then Raven is the only option. Anything else will be a kludge.

Having used D-Touch, I find it very similar to Raven and came away with 3 observations:
#1-After a short time with it, I found it more tiring(too much arm movement). Now I come from the old days of big consoles and those came with lots of arm movement too. But the big difference is that there are many ways to rest your arms on a big console and none with a touch screen.
#2-I was unwilling to put up with the forced limits of what you can show on the screen. Examples: you can't use Narrow Mix view(or the cheat I use for the in-between view), Try to show Instruments with 2 banks of plugins and 1 bank of sends.....can't do it.
#3-Once I got past the "gee whiz" factor, it didn't make me faster(so when the screen failed, that was the end of it for me).

I would opt for a wide screen(non-touch) with a Dock and S1. Remember that its about the students(not you...sorry) and they are much more likely to end up with a control surface and iPad(maybe with a Dock) than a touch screen.

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

I’m also from the console and tape machine era and I’ve yet to find a hardware controller that has a satisfying feel, to me.

So when I want to be able to do that two handed riding thing (with the guitar fader in one hand and the vocal in the other etc. ) the Raven does that for me perfectly.
And the rest of time I can use the mouse if I want to.

Similarly, I have a stream deck and soundflow so a lot of things (like instantiating favourite plug ins, assigning tracks tk my mix buses, bouncing tracks into Melodyne …) are done with single button pushes instead of mousing around.

Whether these things are what should be taught to beginners is a matter of opinion.
But realistically a LOT of professionals are working with a variety of helper products that go beyond a mouse.

Re: Pro Tools Touch Screen
 

Thank you all for your help with this matter. For those of you taking shots at what I proposed, I never meant to offend anyone with what analog and control surfaces that you personally prefer. I was a student not too long ago and I found that just using a mouse and keyboard was what worked best for me. When I bought a control surfaces and it just tended to slow me down in my workflow. I think it really all comes down to what works best for you personally and control surfaces and mixers just aren’t what I found to be useful. Even my old teachers would agree with me to some extent. And I realize that this is for the kids and not myself thank you very much. I want them to have the tools to succeed. I just came here for a little advice about touch screen surfaces and for those of you that helped out I really appreciate it. Thank you!