Behringer X-TOUCH Control Surface with Motorized Faders, LCD Scribble Strips, and USB/MIDI/Ethernet Connectivity

I have to admit I was very wary of this initially. I've always thought Behringer audio gear was a bit cheap and toylike - I'm used to professional equipment that's built like a tank.Now I work for myself I can't justify the prices that Avid/Pro Tools want for a control surface. So after a lot of research (a big thanks to the Gearslutz website) I changed to Logic Pro X DAW and bought this control surface.And I'm staggered by what £ 450 buys you. This thing works so smoothly with Logic Pro. And it's more solid than it looks in the pictures.At the price I can live with the niggles some people mention like...1) You can't see the backlit LCD scribble strips when the desk is flat - an easy solution is to tilt it2) The faders are a little bit noisy/juddery. At the level I monitor at I don't hear them and they track accurately, which is the big concern.Just some of the things I love..1) Solidly built and a small footprint. Just right for a small studio.2) When you touch a fader, Logic jumps to that channel.3) Works reliably all day without locking up.4) When nudging a piece of audio, each encoder has a different step value. So handy for moving cues around quickly.5) Although Behringer don't publish a user's manual, there's a series of brilliant tutorials on Youtube.6) Intuitive - you get up and running very quickly.Edit: Just bought a footswitch and am finding it very useful . For the sockets at the rear of the surface, Footswitch 1 operates the transport start/stop. Footswitch 2 toggles the record punch in and out - great for working on your own. Both pedals need to be a momentary footswitch with NO (Normally open contacts) terminated in 1/4" mono jack.

The benefit of home studios these days is that you can near enough have everything you need on a PC. The downside is that it loses that hands-on tactile feel that a professional studio offers. If like me, you’re a bit old school and like to physically push buttons but are also limited with space, this lovely little midi controller is perfect. Using USB it plugs straight into your PC and the buttons and knobs are fully assignable to actions within your DAW. The price point is spot on and it’s super easy to set up. Definitely gives you a semi-pro fee in your home studio.

I assume someone somewhere knows how to use this to control every aspect of their DAW, but I've yet to figure out the basics and I've been persevering for some months now. On the surface of it, it's fairly straightforward. But once you start doing anything more complicated than simple fader moves and panning, behaviour is unpredictable and buggy. I have a Mac Mini M1 with the latest version of Logic and I've yet to work out how to get it to behave with any predictably. Some times the Plug in shortcut opens the plug in assigned to the currently selected fader, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it works as expected, sometimes it crashes for no fathomable reason. Sometimes it let's you adjust the parameters of the currently in focus plug in window, sometimes it doesn't. Terrible documentation. Terrible support. No support for colour assignable scribble strips. The Expression controller appears to have SysEx disabled but documentation makes no mention of how to enable it. Apart from that, fader automation works brilliantly and the ability to quickly mix drums and control sends is genuinely something I couldn't go back to doing with just a mouse. But for the money it should be more intuitive to use and configure and the lack of proper easy to follow set up documentation is shocking for such a well established brand. Build quality is excellent. Fader caps feel a little plasticy. Jog shuttle wheel is a great time saver. 6 out of 10.

This can make a professional-sounding mix very easy because you can record multiple fader movements at once. Way less fatiguing than using a mouse, and better than using a tablet app as you get physical controls meaning you don’t have to be constantly looking at your screen to see what you’re controlling - you can go by feel and close your eyes and really listen. I pair it with Reaper. While you can’t get all the Behringer controls to affect things in Reaper, the main thing I use it for is automated mixing for tweaking multitrack mixes. The faders were very “jittery” at first (faint ozone smell from the brushes in the fader motors) but if you update the control frequency to 30Hz it works better. If you need a control surface it’s a very good option.