After reading the “one handed digitakt playing” thread, I was wondering—Do folks tend to put their main keyboard instrument to the left or right of their main drum machine/sampler? Or do you stack them vertically?
I’ve been putting my Monologue to the left of my DT lately, but that has more to do with cable length and mixer organization than ergonomics—I like to have things laid out on my workbench in the same order they’re in the mixer, and my mixer has all stereo sources on the far right.
But now I think the keys felt better on the right, since my tendency is to play keys with my dominant hand.
I don’t really have a proper stand to stack the dt on top of the mono, but when I’ve tried a rigged-up version it felt awkward. . . the DT was too high in my vision and holding my arms out in front of me got tiring.
Stacking the mono on top of the digitakt feels “backward” and looks ugly and top-heavy.
(I guess I could go through the “Your setups” thread and do a tally, but I’m not that kind of person.)
I always think that I’m going to play keys with my right hand and tweak knobs or push trigs with my left, but then I end up with my arms crossed in front of me tweaking knobs and pushing trigs with my right and playing chords with my left. I should change it up to account for this, but being lazy is a hard habit to re-patch.
I’ve tried different things, my perma setup is big keyboard to the left with DT on the Virus logo. Laptop, monitor, keyboard and mouse to the right because right-handed. Other stuff moves around on a project basis. That’s just how I work best. Always ergonomic, nothing fighting for space.
I gotta Keystep that moves around wherever it needs to be. Keystep below a Cycles on a stand feels nice.
When I had a Mono I had a vertical stand for the pair and I actually thought it was quite nice. You really want to be creating these “clusters” that feel integrated. Makes a big diff
CONTRA-ry (see what I did there?) to most, I have all my music hardware on my left-hand side, as my laptop is on the right of my desk. I just move my chair so I’m in front of it. My Virus is the only synth on the desk, and it’s in the rack so doesn’t count, but if I had a synth and a drum machine side-by-side, I’d have the drum machine on the right and the synth on the left. That’s because the drums are always the main thing for me, and I’m right-handed.
Right handed. I would have the keys on the left. I’m not a player though, so for me it’s more a matter of tapping in a simple bassline or holding a chord while I sample it. So it’s better to have my right hand for “operations”. Anyway, where’s @captain8 to remind us that the crossfader needs to be on the left???
just like the modwheel is on the left of every single synthesizer on earth
as far as synth beatmachine ergonomics go for me beatmachine is always on the left synth to the right as I visualize the drums first … same way in a daw or sequencer orientation… even though whether i make the drums first or not is about 50/50
I tend to think of the drums as more of the brain of the set up and make the most on the fly tweaks there so prefer it on the right. I did vertical stacking for a while for space reasons but didn’t really dig it.