Introduction
The Vestax Faderboard is a tricky beast to review; whether or not I would recommend it depends entirely on what you’re looking for. I won't be giving it marks out of ten and there'll be relatively few comparisons with similar bits of hardware (there aren't many!). Instead, I'll try to describe: the things it can do; its shortcomings; strengths and the uses I can see for it. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide if it's something for them.
First impressions
After getting it out of the box and wiring it into my setup, I had a quick play before reading the manual, to get a feel for how intuitive it was. I didn't manage to save any samples, but I did differentiate between the keyboard sounds, drums and user sample banks and noticed that they each required a slightly different style of play.
When I first heard about the Faderboard, it was difficult to get an exact idea of what it did/was made for. I’ve since seen a few misleading posts on messageboards and heard equally confusing mistruths from people whose "friend of a friend" has one. To clear things up, I thought it'd be helpful to list what exactly it is and how it can be used.
What it is:
· A midi controller,
· A "non-sequenceable" drum machine,
· A tone/sample based keyboard,
· A phrase sampler,
· An FX unit.
What it isn't:
· A scratch mixer,
· A means of chaining several instruments output together (like a 10 channel mixer could),
· A real "synthesiser",
· Capable of layering several different samples together, to make whole tracks,
· An "all in one" Groovebox.
A Whole New Instrument?
The easiest way to think of a Faderboard is as a sampling keyboard that re-pitches samples to notes over three octaves. Each note is played using an upfader instead of a keyboard key. On top of this, there's a master fader that lets you cut all sound coming out of the Faderboard at any given time.
The Faderboard is definitely a whole new kind of instrument. That phrase is often bandied about, for any slightly innovative bit of gear but, in this case, it's wholly justified. Although the Faderboard uses both scratch DJ and keyboard skills, I found neither to be a massive advantage. You really have to start from scratch (no pun intended) when using it for the first time. Even after having it for over a month, I still feel like I could improve my playing on it a great deal.
Playing different chords after each other, in quick succession, will never be as natural or rapid as on a normal keyboard or piano, as both those instruments have keys which return after pressing them. The Faderboard requires you to pull them back down to mute the note, effectively doubling the shortest possible time between chord changes. Once I stopped trying to play quick chord changes, this wasn’t too frustrating. Since the Faderboard is aimed primarily at scratch DJs, playing chords should be considered an equivalent to playing tones on a record with the pitch control; there'll always be a slight delay before the next one. Provided you wish to play the same chord, just up or down the scale, the easiest way is using the pitch buttons. It’s a real godsend that Vestax put these as buttons, rather than a dial/pot or another fader. The reason it’s so useful is that it allows you to jump around a whole octave. E.g. playing just G,B,D,A, rather than having to go through each note in between. When playing single note melodies, the delay is less noticeable; you can alternate the hand that is used to play the next note and use the other one to bring the current note’s fader back down. Subtle use of the reverb effect can further help hide this to some degree.
Vestax's manual says that the design of the Faderboard allows you to "produce extremely quick percussive patterns that would not necessarily be possible with a keyboard." Generally, this is true. Whilst the “gating” that occurs when you return a fader can be frustrating at times, as you get more used to the Faderboard you learn to accept it as a nuance of the instrument. The Fader techniques needed to play notes anywhere near like how you would a keyboard are quite tricky, but certainly possible. Hopefully I’ll be able to sort some videos out to demonstrate this. Like watching a skilled violinist perform a complex piece, the Faderboard is great to watch: swift, precise and rhythmic movements are needed to play the Faderboard well. I imagine that watching someone who has truly mastered it (I've yet to see anyone who has) would be mind-blowing at a live show.
The thing I found most frustrating about playing the Faderboard was the feeling that I could do so much more with an extra pair of hands: someone else acting as an LFO on the FX dials, cutting the master fader, or even using half the faders alongside me. Living out in the sticks, far from my few DJing friends, meant that I didn't have a chance to try this out.
Rock Solid?
Lots of people seem to comment on the build quality and appearance of the Faderboard. A major point of criticism is the "plasticky" nature of the front panel that the faders sit on. It’s worth mentioning that only the red part of the front is plastic. The rest, including the edging, is metal.
Whilst it’s true that the faders themselves do feel a bit cheap, compared to most upper middle range mixers, I think the view that it's a bit fragile is an undeserved one. I didn't go out of my way to throw the Faderboard down stairs etc., but the build quality feels solid and the metal surround makes it as durable as most mixers. I'd certainly be a lot happier taking it gigging than, say, a mark one Kaoss Pad or Electribe.
The faders could be improved quite a lot. However, the pots are pretty solid and the upfader used to cycle the sound banks/change the pitch was just right: tight enough that vibrations don’t cause it to "jump" but loose enough to let you navigate the sample banks very quickly. The other faders that are “just right” are the horizontal ones used to set the start and end points of the sample. These feel a lot like pan-faders on mixers, but are surprisingly good at setting just the right loop point. Whilst the faders aren’t great, they’re certainly not “bad”: Even a novice like myself can get a half decent crab out of it.
Sounds
The built in sounds can be broken into two categories, drum and tones. Both have a different format of note assignment and require slightly different playing techniques. For the drum sounds, there are essentially ten kits made up of ten single hits each of which is linked to a particular upfader. The beats are triggered when you use the upfaders, rather than looping: The faders start the sound playing, instead of simply turning the volume on, as it would when using a normal mixer. The tones vary between single note hits and tones that can be held indefinitely. In this mode each fader is assigned a pitch like a keyboard: 10 faders = 1 octave + 2 “spare” notes from the next octave up. There is an octave -1,0 and +1 switch which effectively trebles the range of the keyboard.
The drum machine is probably my favourite part of the Faderboard. Although hard to play whole complex drum parts using it, it is ideal for "playing along" to other records. For example, it’s useful for adding hi-hats in, or using a kick drum to keep the beat going when it drops out. Using an external sampler to layer the various loops could give some very interesting results.
Although the tones are described as "synth" sounds, that's more to do with their sonic properties, than the way they're created. The user doesn't have any control over the waveform, LFO, ADSR envelope etc. although some additional control is given by the use of the onboard FX. Thankfully, there is a reasonably wide variety of good quality sounds ranging from realist basses to organs and synth tones. I'm pretty sure that at least some of them are actually multi-sampled, rather than just the same sample being re-pitched.
The sampling takes a bit of getting used to, recording and assigning samples to a bank is not as intuitive as some samplers. That said it soon becomes second nature and doesn’t really slow you down. The ability to play back samples at different pitches, with FX, etc. before committing it to the memory banks of the Faderboard is a welcome one, meaning that you only need to overwrite samples when you’re happy with the new one. You can save it after the ends have been trimmed, to ensure it loops well and it will save the new loop, but not fader based re-pitching, or after the FX have been applied. Needing to use another sampler to get the most out of it is a bit frustrating, but I suppose this is true of quite a few samplers.
Something that would have been useful is a time stretching tool. Whilst the speed up with the re-pitching is probably most natural to DJs, it would be nice to have optional time stretching. As it is, you can’t layer (the same) sampled loops together at the same pitch without them falling out of synch. A bit of a shame, as you could have used the Faderboard to “fatten” up bass sounds by playing them, along with a copy one octave lower.
As I’ve already mentioned, the part I like most about the Faderboard is the ability to play drums on it. Given the Faderboard's limited sampling memory, I can forgive that it doesn’t let you layer loops (ten three second loops doesn’t make for massively complex music), but it seems a real oversight that you can’t assign each sample as a single hit on the various faders. It would really allow people to completely re-arrange drum parts and also recreate classic drum sounds from things like the TR-808 using samples. Although this would use up your entire 10 banks, you could save each custom kit to the memory card. It’s hard to emphasise how good playing drums on the Faderboard “feels”. My natural rhythm is pretty poor, but even I could appreciate how responsive it is. There’s just something about using upfaders to trigger drum sounds that works so much better than keys on a keyboard and, in many cases, using pads.
E-e-f-f-f-f-e-e-c-c-t-t-s-s:
I tend to use "studio" quality software effects and I'm usually a bit of a snob about the quality/tweakability of DJ-oriented FX units and FX built into mixers, but I was pleasantly surprised with the onboard FX. There is a wide selection of effects: reverb, delay, distortion and flanger, amongst others. They're of a pretty good quality, especially given that they're "on board" effects as opposed to those on a bit of gear that only does FX (like the Korg Kaoss pad). The FX can be used on the input source too, so you're effectively getting a reasonable FX box included as part of the Faderboard.
Some of the most interesting results of the Faderboard can be achieved when using it with other gear. Midi setup was painless and fairly intuitive. I needed about 30 seconds with the manual to get it all up and running. I had it controlling a synth and later, a drum machine. One thing I found confusing was that the midi send signals didn’t tie in exactly with the notes the Faderboard plays. For example, where the faders only play the standard 8 notes of each octave, they actually send midi data to trigger each note (flats and sharps included), this means that it’s not really possible to play the Faderboard’s tones and layer that with an external synth, as the Faderboard will not be playing the same notes, but often adjacent ones. Music theory fans will recognise this as cacophonies. You might argue that the problem lies as much in the Synth as the Faderboard, which would be fair, but it would be good for the Faderboard to have an extra midi mode to accommodate this.
Routing
The Faderboard has: Audio connections in for mic, line in and phono, as well as a grounding point for a turntable. There is a midi out (but not "in" or "thru") port, master line out and also a space for headphones.
I stumbled upon quite a nice trick: using the crossfader on the Faderboard to cut the 'table going into the “phono in” on the Faderboard, and the one on the mixer to control the one on the other table. With a sharp fader on both curves, this allows for very fast switching on and off of individual channels (independently of each other), much quicker than you could with a single crossfader. It's pretty much the same as chaining two mixers together and putting a deck on each one but, again, the Faderboard would allow someone who doesn't have a second mixer to try this out.
Another slight plus is that (like many effects units) you’re effectively getting a phono -> line converter included, so you can sample from a turntable into devices that lack phono connectors, without having to tie up your mixer. A small factor perhaps, but if you don’t have anything else capable of doing it, you’ll be saving yourself £30 or so. If anything, it’s these sort of little things that all add up to make the Faderboard a lot of gear in one box. To someone with a well equipped studio, the only really new trick the Faderboard offers is a good quality midi controller with faders. I’m not knocking that- it’s a lot more innovation than you get with a lot of hardware- simply saying that most of the extra little things can already be done on other gear. To someone without much kit, however, the Faderboard could be the answer to a lot of prayers.
Would I buy one?
At the moment, I can't see myself making enough use of one to justify the cost: £500+ can buy some pretty impressive kit. That said, I've already got most of the functionality the Faderboard offers in other gear, so wouldn't stand to gain that much by adding one to my setup.
I can, however, see someone getting a lot of use out of one live, especially if they play as a DJ for a band. The Faderboard would also be good for a DJs who have no hardware other than their decks and want something that'll integrate easily with a pair of tables and mixer and allow them a bit more creative flexibility when DJing.
The Faderboard is pretty versatile, although the Fader concept and marketing would suggest an application just for scratch DJing, it would fit well into other genres. I’m into electronic music as well as hip hop and can see a lot of applications for it there too. Personally, I would definitely be interested in a mk2 version with more onboard sampling memory which allowed you to make whole tracks, map multiple samples to the faders at the same time and build your own drum kits.
Summing Up
Hats off to Vestax, they definitely stepped out on a limb making this and I doubt they ever expected it to take off in a big way (it doesn't seem to have). In my book, it's commendable that they took a chance on what is definitely a risky bit of hardware and, although the price is pretty high, it isn’t artificially so. An instrument like this is going to be made in fairly limited numbers so there'll always be a fair chunk of R&D costs recouped per unit, as well as the cost of making what is a fairly feature-rich unit. I’m glad it was made and sure that we will, at some point, hear someone do something really innovative using one.
