X-Touch : Great for the money

I've been a amateur musician for around 25 years and have seen technology progress around me and while some of it doesn't always seem necessary I sort of understand it's value in the world of creativity. This isn't one of those.

This thing is brilliant for workflow and speeding up my creative process and I wish I'd bought it sooner. I primarily use the transport buttons as puling out my keyboard drawer to find the R or * key and then throwing the drawer back to it's closed position and then finding my place on the guitar or keyboard often saw me either pressing the wrong key or making a mistake during the beginning of the take.

The buttons on this thing are lovely and large and illuminated so you always know where you are, programming the function keys is a breeze and the touch sensitive faders are a great way to quickly get around the arrange window and adjust monitoring volume while recording. I've not actually used it for mixing "properly" yet but the little rough mixes I've done in my projects with this are great fun to undertake and feel more tactile not using a mouse to do the majority of the work. If you can afford this and are serious about your creativity, buy it.