So as I mentioned in my last blog I am going to talk about my first gigs/experience with the Nocturn and how it has assimilated into my live rig. I got the Nocturn sent to me a while back from the top secret Novation controller laboratory. My initial response was that I was not surprised at how good the unit felt and how good the build quality seemed as I have been used to that with Novation controllers for a long time. I had been using a Remote 37SL since their introduction as my main controller for Ableton in my live work with Howard Jones.

Although I really liked the Automap capabilities I was always a little frustrated because I wanted the best of both worlds. I wanted intelligent control but I also wanted to be able to configure or hard wire certain capabilities for live as well. Call me greedy but thats what I wanted. I have a very set “mixer setup’ for controlling Abelton which involves all my filter cutoffs, aux sends, kill switches etc but I also wanted to get my grubby mits on whatever plugin I was currently using to mangle the audio that I was sending & receiving to & from Ableton. Enter stage left my shining knight in the form of the Nocturn. What if I could use my ReMote as the master controller of everything mix related & then use a Nocturn in Automap mode to give me instant tweaking of any plugin that took my fancy! A quick chat to the sun starved scientists at Novation confirmed that was a viable solution so I set about setting up my lovely mk 2 Live system with both controllers. Everything installed fine but after a little fiddling with the Automap 2.0 software it emerged that at the time you could only setup third party AU/VST plugs to adhere to Automap 2.0 & not Abletons own proprietary plugs! Now for some that might not be an issue but I have taken the stand after bitter experience to add as few variables into my setup as possible & one of my things is only using Abletons own fx set for this reason. The solution was that I could setup 16 midi controller maps that I could manually select from the user button on the Nocturn. So a quick rethink & with the resolve that my mk 2 Live setup would have to stay in a mk 1.5 stage for a while I rationalised the 16 most important plugins/chains that I would want quick access to. Within an hour I was able to set all these up & before long I was cooking the mix with my ReMote & madly tweaking plugins with virtually no brain exertion. The incredible thing is that i have done a few gigs now & I literally have the Nocturn, Remote 37 SL & a firewire audio interface all running bus powered from my macbook & the system hasn’t crashed once in over 2 months!

My only Achilles heel was that early software didn’t remember the midi control map names so I had some frantic renaming to do before the first couple of gigs but thats all but a distant memory now. I am now looking forward to a full native implementation of the Automap 2 technology for harnessing Live in an even more elegant fashion but in the meantime the Nocturn is still doing me proud. Next time I will let you know how I have been finding a use for it with my remote studio setup on a trip to France & even in my ‘proper studio’ Even my vintage robots are impressed!