Nocturn Review
So I did a meta-review a while back over the Novation Nocturn. Well, I have had mine for a month now and I feel confident that I can give it a decent review now.
I will start at the beginning with the install. It comes with a quick start card and a install disk, no manual. The manual is in PDF form on the disk. I see more and more companies doing this lately and I have to say that I am not a fan of PDF manuals. Even though I have a dual monitor setup, it is still hard to flip through a PDF the way you would a physical manual and still have the program up to tinker with. But lets just take this as a sign that the setup is so intuitive that you need nothing other than a quick setup, with Cubase SX3, which I use, this is actually the case. You go through the setup...next next next...until you get to the plugin manager. You drag the plugins you want to control over and off you go.
Starting up Cubase I realize that the Automap 2.0 program has made a copy of all my plugins and appended (automap) to the new version. This means that in all my old sessions I will have to go in and save the current state to a preset and unload the plugin, load the automap version and load the preset.
Wait...Viva Las Vegas just came on, gotta sing it to my girl...blame it on the scotch.
Ok, back to work. So to play with my new toy I had to start a new session, no prob. Load up some D'n'B breaks and a bass synth, kick up a loop and get to tweaking. Here is where this thing starts to shine. I loaded Glitch on the drum loop track and hit the "FX" button. This brings up the Automap GUI, and shows all the insert plugins applied over the knobs. You simply touch the knob that corresponds to the plugin you want to control and it shows you all the controls of that plugin mapped out across the virtual nocturn of the GUI with page up and down buttons to scroll through the multitude of parameters that you can tweak with the knobs. By just grabbing a few knobs I can now get some nice Justice/Daft Punk type grooves, so easy. Very nice, but not really my style. Actually it kinda takes the coolness out of music like that.
So now I hit the mixer button and the nocturn takes control of Cubases mixer, Awesome! CRASH!!!! Shit! Restart, reload. Over the next few weeks I get the same thing over and over, crashing. Automap is as stable as my faith in the government...and I am an anarchist. The Nocturn has afforded me an amazing amount of control over my plugins and synths. It makes them feel organic and real, I can easily manipulate everything almost as quickly as if they were physical units sitting on my desk. But I will be damned if I would trust this thing on stage. I would be surprised if you could make it though a set without it taking a shit. In fact last night I had to uninstall, clean the registry and reinstall just to get Automap to start without making the whole system instantly bomb out. This is more than a little glitch, we are talking catastrophic failure if you are on stage. Not to mention that when it is working, Automap seems to make all your plugins take up more cpu than normal, but only when tweaking the knobs. My workflow at home is much improved by my nocturn but it seems offset by the totally unpredictable crashing. Hopefully when Novation updates its Automap 2.0 software they will have worked out some of the bugs therein. Oh and if you were hopeing to use this with Ableton Live, well you are going to have to set everything up manually with midi CC. Don't you wish you had a "real" manual now?
Overall I would still say the Nocturn is cool. I would not however give it the 10/10 rating that Computer Music Magazine did. There is a lot I was left wanting, but it still beats the pants off of manually programing the knobs of my axiom in Cubase. However, if Live is your thing I would not recommend the Nocturn. Since Live has that niffty midi mapping feature, it kinda renders the whole Automap 2.0 program useless. And if you want to use it for your DJ software...forget it. They don't support any DJ software. I don't even know why they bothered to put a cross fader on the thing since it never maps to anything automatically.
Do I sound bitter? Maybe just a bit. I guess it was all the hype that got my hopes up. The Nocturn has a lot of potential, if it could only kick the crash habbit and pick up a few more friends, namely Ableton Live and some DJ software. Oh well, heres hoping to some quick updates.