What is it?
Touch Innovations' Kontrol Master is a fully customisable controller for your DAW. You can control any dial or fader with the big touch-capacitive knob and program any of the 10 arcade-style buttons to any shortcut or function of your choosing.
Why should I be interested?
Flexibility is the key point here. There is so much customisation on offer. You can set up the buttons to control all manner of functions from a list of pre-mapped destinations, but the big win is that it is so easy to assign those buttons to any key commands and keyboard shortcuts of your choosing.
The big knob can tweak anything simply by hovering the mouse over the control of your choosing - it's that easy. You're also able to control the sensitivity; from super slow movement to fast sweeps depending on how precise you want to be.
You can easily recall control sets, so you'll be able to switch between controlling your DAW and any soft synth very easily.
The only DAW the booth demoist was interacting with was Reason, but it's said that mappings for all the big players will be available very soon.
What's the competition?
As far as we can tell, there are no other DAW controllers on the market that look and feel quite like this one.
When and how much?
The Kontrol Master is available now and retails for $299.
The early verdict
This could be the ideal centrepiece controller for producers who want to speed up their workflow and rely less on the mouse. The fact that the control possibilities are almost endless here - and that you have a fully functioning DAW controller and performance tool in one box - will definitely stand the Kontrol Master in good stead.
Find out more at the Touch Innovations website.
