This old relic, this is your grandma’s motorized fader. And motorized faders are wonderful for automating stuff. And automation’s great because who doesn’t like things that move by themselves?
But if you’ve ever noticed, newer faders are silver. It means they’re capacitive. And it’s significant because if that fader’s already in motion and you’ve reached a grab it, you have to override that motor.
Now on a screen, the computer knows when you press the mouse, and it knows to draw that automation, and when you release the mouse, it releases the fader. It’s the silver capacitive coding on this fader that makes it touch sensitive. So the DAW knows when I grab it.
Without it, you’d be fighting its motion, and you’d have to override it. When you’re working with MIDI equipment like this, you’re often working without a capacitive fader. And the solution is that the mixer or the DAW will wait to update the fader position until it passes through its current position.
So if the current position of the faders are all here and yours happens to be down here, when you go to turn it up, it’s not going to read this value until it passes through this point. At which point, it’ll get louder. A capacitive fader, on the other hand, is going to allow you to use touch mode as if you were touching the screen with your mouse.
Touch the fader, your finger will take over control, and when you let go, the DAW will release the automation. You’ll find with a lot of older equipment that touching either overrides the motor, or sometimes you’ll find there’s a special button. Like a car, it’s called a clutch.
Pushing it will signal to the DAW that it’s supposed to start writing. But as you probably know, we almost never use write mode. There are really only three modes of automation you’re likely to use much.
touch, read, and off. And you can share that with someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen glass.
