Mackie Control Universal Review

For a long time I have known about the Mackie Control Universal. I have seen it in the Sweetwater catalog for years, as well as in various pictures of “pro studios”. As I’ve been getting busier and busier with more music and sound design jobs, I have been looking into it more and more to see if it could really speed up my workflow.

With a little extra cash in the bank, I made the leap. As fortune would have it, the folks at Sweetwater actually even had a b-stock available to save me some cost. Setup was quick and easy with simply a power plug and two MIDI cables running into my trusty little MOTU audio interface. Of course, being all excited about it and everything I somehow forgot to plug BOTH cables into the interface (though both were plugged into the Mackie). After some cursing at myself, followed by laughter at my stupidity, all was working very well with Logic Pro. Apple even provided a handy reference guide for what the myriad of buttons on the Mackie Control do in Logic which was very handy since I didn’t quite understand the meaning of ALL of the buttons right away!

After getting up to speed with it I can’t really point out many “flaws” per say as much as wishing it did a bit more for helping me to automate plug-ins. It *does* have some functionality for this, but its convoluted in my opinion and a bit harder to use that I would hope. Of course, Mackie makes a device just for this called the Mackie C4, so I guess they figured out it wasn’t the most intuitive either!

The things I most like it about are:

• The jog wheel. Not only does it let you jump around quickly through whatever score you are working on, it ALSO can be used in scrub mode through the push of a button which can really help in film projects for syncing something up with exactly the right frame. In a recent film project, I can’t tell you how many times I went into scrub mode, then quickly hit another button on the control to mark the place in the timeline to match a big hit in the score.
• Quick Access to simple “toggle” buttons. Very commonly when recording I bounce back and forth between having a click on the track and not. Its VERY convenient to have a button solely dedicated to toggling this very close to the transport control. A similar convenience is turning looping on/off or mute/soloing a track. Yes, all of these are done easily with the mouse as well, but between two large LCD screens and a dozens of tracks at high resolution, it can take a little dexterity to go through and mute 5-6 tracks or so. With the control, I just punch all 5 buttons at once and BAM — done.
• Motorized Faders. Besides the obvious “cool” factor associated with motorized faders, there is something wonderfully musical about being able to “ride the volume fader” to make a sampled instrument really have some life in it, especially riding 3-4 faders at once. I often add some realism to a 3-4 part string section by laying in the automation for all the parts at once and adding fluctuations of 2-3 dB per part. This really creates a more dynamic and life-like feel to the sound. Also, for fade in and outs its suprisingly faster to just set a fader to “touch” mode (also with a quick button press) and then ride the fader in and out then to draw this automation by hand.
• Panning. There are also knobs on each track that can be assigned to multiple things, but I like to keep them usually on panning. When it comes time for the final mix, it is much more precise and efficient to pan parts using these knobs than by hand.
• Scribble Strips. The clever 5-6 character abbreviations the Mackie produces from my track names (by usually pulling out the vowels) really help me keep things straight with which fader on the control goes to what track in the mix to the point where I’ve mixed sections for minutes at a time without at actually looking up at the screen. This is very freeing and forces you to LISTEN to the music more than “watch” it!

In summary, it was a very worthwhile investment that has proven handy in every job I do. It is all the more frustrating then when it doesn’t seem to work at all in my second most used audio application, Peak Pro.

It would be crazy useful to be able to even just use the scrub wheel in that application! However, now that I made the link to Peak Pro, I see there is a new version out already — so I suppose I’ll be looking into that soon as well…