it certainly looks like fun & the touch screen makes it more so but in a live situation I think I would prefer something more tactile like the push for live or the mashine & in the studio who needs it? Seems like you have to program all your parts to start with right? At least thats what I gathered from the vid but there is probably a lot more to it. I think if I programmed beats on a touch screen it would not last too long :)

I haven't yet used this feature of FLS, but one thing about the product in general is that it is the king of usability (better in fact overall than Cubase, Live, Logic et al), so while I would say yes you probably need to program the parts to start with, it probably has some very smart mapping feature that takes your projects and maps it into a very usable form. The same would be true with Maschine, right? For example, I use Maschine as a sampler very often. Just hit the slice button and a sound is all sliced up and mapped to pads, but on many sounds you still want to adjust the start and end points to get rid of clicks and such.

So I will go out on a limb and say the usability factor would be something similar to Maschine, but the real value I see here is the size of the screen, the fact that each part is text-labeled and you get a little visual of it (one area I think FLS excels) so you can see what's what. You also might have noticed a little progress bar that shows the movement of the part on screen -- whereas with Maschine or most of the other controllers you just get a button that is either lit or not.

Don't get me wrong, I would always keep using Maschine for what I use it for now -- percussion and sampling -- I don't see a touch screen as a replacement for it. I'm sure the touch screen isn't even velocity sensitive (unless you count things like touch higher up =hard, lower down=soft which is not the same IMO). I do see a lot of uses for a large multi touch screen like that that are outside what I would use Maschine for.

One thing I'm not sure about, lets say you want to go nuts in performance mode like that, but potentially capture everything you did and edit arrange it. I haven't seen how FLS handles that or if it does it at all. I guess it could just map parts to keys on a keyboard and edit in the piano roll but that could get crazy.

I think you need to get familiar with any software before you can use it well. But, even though I'm a Logic user (mostly), I tend to think Ableton Live offers the fastest way to get ideas going.

An interesting video with some cool looking and sounding machinery!

Here's a sound demo of the Novation's Bass Station 2. Sounds pretty damn good to me! :cool:

Must fight the gear lust, must fight...;)

"RESISTANCE IS FUTILE" :rolleyes: