More and more users agree that using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to record and mix music brings a great many advantages. Similarly, users also tend to agree on the disadvantages of working "in the box," one of the most talked-about being the fact that you're chained to a mouse to turn knobs, move faders, arm tracks...
Today there's a good number of control surfaces that let you push the mouse into the background. Aimed at users who don't need complex control surfaces but do want to enjoy their benefits, Alphatrack offers a good set of tools to streamline control of many DAWs.
The design
The idea behind the design of this surface is that many users only need controls to handle a single track, since they don't usually adjust more than one at a time.
With this premise in mind, the designers at Frontier Design decided to create a control surface with all the controls needed to handle one track, and they added many of the functions commonly used in a DAW.
The result is a control surface with a 100 mm motorized (touch-sensitive) fader, three programmable touch-sensitive knobs, transport buttons (Play, Stop, Rec, etc.), and a good number of additional buttons to control things like Solo, Mute, Zoom...
It also has a 32-character backlit display and a touch surface that lets you control things like Scrub, Shuttle, etc.
The touch-sensitive controls
The three rotary knobs and the motorized fader are touch-sensitive. This is a great help when operating the unit, since every time one of these controls is touched, the display shows the parameter's name and value.
Since, depending on the surface's working mode, each of these controls can govern a different aspect of the DAW (details below), the fact that they're touch-sensitive speeds up the workflow enormously, because you always know which parameter is affected and what its value is.
As for the touch surface (called a touch-strip, similar to a laptop's touchpad but somewhat narrower), it has several functions assigned. When touched with a single finger, it lets you move the insertion cursor along the timeline.
However, when used with two fingers, the touch-strip acts as a shuttle wheel, speeding up and slowing down the timeline depending on how far the fingers move from the center of the surface.
The last function available through the touch-strip is navigation between the session's markers. Tapping either end of the strip lightly moves you to the previous/next marker.
Other functions
In addition to its five transport buttons (the usual RW, FF, stop, play and rec), Alphatrack has eight more buttons which, together with a ninth button, Shift, give access to 16 DAW parameters.
The exact function of these buttons differs slightly between platforms, since each one gives access to different parameters. In Pro Tools, the DAW used to test the Alphatrack, the eight buttons controlled the following parameters:
Zoom In (F1): Select previous track (<TRACK)
Zoom Out (F2): Select next track (TRACK>)
Scrub mode (F3): Loop play (LOOP)
Undo (F4): Flip (FLIP)
Used together with the controller's Shift button, these same buttons give access to:
Pre Roll On/Off (F5): Set start point (IN)
Post Roll On/Off (F6): Set end point (OUT)
Audition mode (F7): Quick Punch (PUNCH)
Redo (F8): Toggle between the mix and edit windows (WINDOW)
All of them have their own LED, and the special Shift, Mute, Solo and Rec buttons light up or blink to show they're active (red, yellow, green and red, respectively).
Working modes
As mentioned earlier, the parameters affected by the rotary knobs and fader depend on the working mode Alphatrack is in. These modes are Pan, Send, EQ, Plugin and Auto, and they're selected with their respective buttons.
Pan mode is the one active by default. In it, the first knob lets you select the track Alphatrack acts on. This function is similar to that of the < Track and Track > buttons, but with the difference that it lets you move through the tracks faster.
The second knob is used to navigate between the session's markers (similar to the touch-strip function), and the third adjusts the track's pan. In Send mode, the first encoder has the same function as in the previous mode (moving the controller's focus). Once the track is chosen, the second knob lets you select the send you want to control, and pressing it (the knobs also act as buttons) toggles the send between Pre and Post.
The third knob adjusts the send level, and if you'd rather control this level with the fader, pressing the Flip button temporarily hands control of this parameter over to the main fader.
The third mode, EQ, gives quick access to the parameters of Digidesign's EQ3 plugin. When this mode is selected, the three knobs adjust different aspects of the equalizer (Q, frequency, gain...), but with one caveat: the plugin must be inserted in slot C.
If the EQ3 plugin is inserted in another slot, or if a different plugin occupies that slot, EQ mode won't give access to the plugin. In figure one, the track on the left could use EQ mode; the one on the right could not.
In the fourth mode (Plugin), the first knob selects the plugin you want to control, the second lets you change which parameter to act on and the third sets its value. Again, in figure one you can see the blue rectangle indicating which insert slot is selected in plugin mode.
Finally, Auto mode gives access to automation: you can select the track with the left knob, the automation type (read, touch, latch, etc.) with the center one, and the parameter to automate with the right one (volume, pan, send level, etc.).
Next to the main fader there are three LEDs: a red one that blinks when automation writing is active, a green one that stays lit when automation is being read ("read"), and a yellow one, "Any Solo," that blinks when solo is engaged on any track.
Compatibility
The control surface connects to the computer (PC or Mac) via a USB cable that also supplies power, something laptop users will appreciate, since no additional power supplies are needed.
The drivers that came with the controller already provided access to many of the best-known DAWs, such as Pro Tools (HD, LE and M-Powered), Cubase, Digital Performer, Cakewalk, Nuendo, Sonar, Reason, Tracktion... A visit to the manufacturer's website (www.frontierdesign.com) revealed a good number of additional plugins and a new version of the drivers, giving access to many other audio programs.
The same website has user guides for the various DAWs, plus handy summary sheets, or layouts, that gather all the information about the Alphatrack's functions on a single page (available for each supported program).
In operation
Installing the control surface and getting Pro Tools to recognize it couldn't have been faster. Within five minutes the Alphatrack was ready to work.
When you open a session with the Alphatrack enabled, the first eight tracks appear with their names outlined by a blue box, the first of them being the one in the control surface's focus.
With the buttons
(and with the left knob, depending on the working mode) these eight boxes move as a block, changing the track Alphatrack acts on. A faster way to select the "active" track is to right-click on the track name (Ctrl+Click on single-button Macs), a method that may be more convenient.
Note: from Pro Tools 7.3 onward, this right-click brings up a context menu. To make Alphatrack shift its focus to the track, you have to select the "Scroll Into View" option from the menu.
Once the track is selected, Alphatrack's various modes are available for controlling the different parameters. This is where the summary sheet comes in handy because, despite its small size, the control surface packs in quite a few functions, and at first it can be a bit hard to remember all the button combinations.
Generally speaking, you could say that Alphatrack has two kinds of functions: those that affect a specific track and those that provide DAW-wide functions. Among the former are access to track level (on the fader), solo, mute, rec (arming the track), pan, send level and pan, access to plugins and automation settings.
Among the latter are the buttons for zoom in/out, transport, turning pre-roll and post-roll on and off, undo and redo, enabling loop mode, enabling quick punch, and toggling between the mix and edit windows.
Integration
After a few days, Alphatrack gradually becomes part of your workflow, until a point comes where the symbiosis between keyboard shortcuts, mouse clicks and control surface functions makes day-to-day work more efficient. Personally, there were certain things I found quicker to keep doing with the mouse (such as accessing plugins), but even so, adding the surface sped up my work.
The transport buttons are very useful and the fader is very comfortable for adjusting the different levels. At this point I should mention that, for certain applications, the fader motor can be somewhat noisy. It can be disabled by pressing Stop+Mute. Pan and Send modes are also very productive, and buttons like those for pre-roll and post-roll, switching windows and quick punch are very useful when recording.
There's a small detail with the zoom buttons that could be improved: on a standard keyboard, the letters R and T act as zoom out and zoom in, respectively. On the Alphatrack, the zoom out button is on the right and the zoom in button on the left, in other words, exactly the opposite of the keyboard.
Support staff told us this can't be customized by the user, because the communication protocol used (HUI) doesn't allow programming. However, they say it's being evaluated for a future driver revision. The HUI protocol is also responsible for another point that could be improved: navigation between session markers follows the number assigned to each marker, not its position on the timeline.
This can cause unexpected jumps when navigating, since instead of moving to the next marker shown on screen, you may end up at another marker located at the end of the session, if that one was created earlier. Fortunately, in recent versions of Pro Tools the number assigned to each marker can be edited. If you usually use markers to locate the different parts of a song (Intro, Verse 1, Chorus, etc.), it may be a good idea to create all those markers first with consecutive numbers, to avoid unexpected jumps later.
Apart from these two small details, the versatility Alphatrack offers is truly remarkable. One standout point in this respect is automation. Changes made in real time with the control surface can be recorded as automation, which makes it easy, for example, to do gain riding.
Since, in addition, automation of different parameters can be recorded simultaneously, you can create more complex effects, such as dynamically varying a track's level and that of its parallel send to a processor, or any other combination you can think of.
In Auto mode you have access to each track's automation settings and, to complement this, the keyboard shortcut that lets you automate the various parameters of a plugin is very useful: Ctrl+Alt+Start+Click on the parameter (Windows) or Command+Option+Control+Click on Mac.
Conclusions
So far we've only mentioned some of Alphatrack's functions. There simply hasn't been room to talk about, for example, other keyboard shortcuts performed with the Stop button, Audition mode, Scrub/Shuttle mode, the footswitch, the touch surface, etc. Rarely does a piece of gear under 300 euros offer so much.
This control surface can drive a large number of DAWs, and the list seems to keep growing. Frontier Design's support staff is truly efficient, and Alphatrack's features keep being constantly refined and fine-tuned through new releases of drivers and plugins. On the downside (if it can be considered that), it's worth noting that the user has to go through a certain learning process, since the surface offers quite a lot of possibilities in a small space, and at first it can take some effort to integrate the unit into your way of working.
It's also true that there are minor details that could be improved, such as those mentioned about EQ mode, zoom or markers, but this pales in comparison to everything the unit offers. In short, a good investment in terms of value for money that can be a big step forward in optimizing your daily work.
