#41

Design 1 is great. I’d drop the tape and add mute buttons and you’re there!

4 Likes
#42

Solo in addition to mute, please. :slight_smile:

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#43

yep. what i meant was if the resources exist for people to learn and DIY, then we get variations. ie all the midi-teensy devices here.

3 Likes
#44

I like your designs, thank you for sharing them. It’s an interesting UX puzzle to think about.

1 was immediately easy to understand so I was drawn to it. Love the idea of the stereo send/returns. You could potentially make them pre/post configurable with the master section space. If you didn’t do that, I think making them pre makes the mixer a bit more adaptable. Another cool use of that space would be a 1 knob bus comp (though really a 1-knob bus comp might best be a 2-knob one with wet/dry for pushing hard and parallel processing so that might not work too well in the space). :slight_smile:

2 – I think it’s cool you did the diagonal jacks because it would make using right angled cables possible, which would come out of the mixer in a much more elegant way. they might need to be spaced just a tad more to make that perfect…I’d experiment with that if this ever came to fruition.

I do think in a small package like this a dialed-in one knob eq is a bit better use of space than 2-knob eq. And master eq

3–this one took me a second to get, but I like it! I think as @andrew mentions a combination of 1 and 3 would be nice. Maybe 1 or 2 of these channel linking pairs could replace the mono section on 1…the pan knob being replaced with the 1-knob eq. Or maybe just have these linking channels but with the stereo sends.

I do get a lot of use out of mute/solo buttons when I’m making music (so that I can solo and hone in on a certain sound). I do think the things your looking at are small enough where you could emulate solo with multiple finger simultaneous mute taps, so maybe to save space just mute would be best?

also, this is probably extremely niche, and no idea how the circuit it’d work, but I have personally tended to do stuff more back-forward mixing with m/s balance rather than around the l/r spectrum coz I think it feels better to me. could be cool if you could change what the balance control does with an internal jumper or something.

#45

I like your mixer 1. Mutes would be a great addition for performance and for designing patches. Solos would be cool too, but where would these 8 or 16 buttons fit?

I like the stereo sends and returns. Would the mono channels sends go to the center, or would the send pan follow the main pan? Creatively both can be useful, but adding yet another switch per channel might not fit well. Maybe a global switch?

Or how about a single button per channel, and a global three way switch to change the channel buttons from mute to solo to follow-main-pan. The buttons would change their color, of course.

1 Like
#46

A minimal mixer with four joysticks–it is decided!

5 Likes
#47

The “Persephone” Mixer

Minimal mixers
#49

These may be a useful datapoint, it’s meant to be a true modular mixer but to figure out how to put several modules together (and what features you end up with) can be a bit of a puzzle… so it’s both encouragement for the idea of developing mixer building blocks… and it also illustrates how any low-level building block will necessarily create limitations in what kind of mixer you can build.

https://frap.tools/products/mixer/

#50

option #1 is perfect

also if this were diy (and i stopped being lazy) i’d make mine w/ bananas for no-input mixing joy

2 Likes
#52

One knob EQ with center being neutral seems good (in theory at least!)
Removing pan is I’m sure controversial – I wonder if the mono channels could have slightly panned fixed positions.
Some kind of one knob drive/compression could definitely be fun.
If we were doing faders I’d be tempted to skip mutes but I guess with knobs it’s essential.
No return levels on this one.
And… meters?
Headphones is the other thing for something portable-ish of course (not shown here).
Starts to feel less minimal :slightly_smiling_face:

Audio Mixers 2
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12 Likes
#53

Love the idea of a one knob EQ.
Reminds me of the Tonelux Tilt, which is simple and quick to use.
Something like this would be handy to give different instruments their space in the spectrum.
Surely less minimal, but with Pan being added back in this looks pretty ideal to me.

2 Likes
#54

this is cool. part of me is wondering if you could do away with the master section all together. All the cases I’d use a mixer for would have it going into another device (interfaces, norns, elektron heat) which offers the master control/headphone piece of this.

EDIT: though not sure where those out jacks would go in that case…you’d have to really squeeze them

1 Like
#55

Really like where this design is going. Pan controls would be ideal to include, as I think fixed panning on a mixer of this form factor seems like it could actually make use cases less flexible. & not to get ahead of the minimal curve but a mid/side level instead of pan on the stereo channels would be something special.

Make sure to budget space for a power connector / switch :sunglasses:

#56

maybe controversial, but i’d rather have panning than sends/returns.

if it’s gonna have returns (which i like! just saying it’s hard to fit everything on a small form factor), i preferred the prior design with return levels to this one with the drive knob

2 Likes
#57

Fun thread. I’m of the mind that EQ is rarely needed for me in terms of a mixer; worse yet is when I do use it and forget that I’ve made an adjustment and then go through an entire recording without noticing some key frequency has been dialed out. I love minimal mixers of just tons of inputs, pan, and level.

No need for an insert but love multiple routing options. Mackie is nice with this, a 1624 VLZ has three separate outputs, all switchable on and off, along with unexpected back panel stuff, like each channel has its own output.

The conversation about mixing CV is interesting. I regret not getting on the Poltergeist (discussed above) I would love that too. CV control of pan and fade would be great. A channel strip like the dotcom VCA++ across an entire section would be great:

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Maybe add in an EQ section where you have the headphones and outputs. But a whole row of twenty of these would be terrific. Note that CV is incorporated in pan and VCA. All that’s really missing for me here is dynamic muting and alt send.

#58

Good grief I need this. Won’t even look up the cost. Those joysticks look like little Buchla Bongs!

1 Like
#59

If that single knob eq was a lpf/hpf that could be very handy imo. Though seperate lpf/hpf knobs would give you band-pass which would be a very quick way of giving space.

4 Likes
#60

So, product manager hat on - I think fundamentally, many of us might have very different opinions of what a “minimal mixer” (tossing a nod to the originating thread) is. Before we start discussing features, it feels like it might be a good idea to get on the same page about that. Are we referring to minimal in features? Minimal in size? Minimal in aesthetics? Some combination of that?

4 Likes
#61

One idea to riff off the nearness approach to panning is to take the ‘fixed’ spread of the nearness and attach it to a single knob for the width of the stereo field, almost cold mac survey style. It’s something that came up in the nearness thread a while back, discussion on these ideas starts somewhere around here: Prototyping Nearness, a minimal panning mixer module

  • Center is no panning,
  • Full left turn is max vol on the outer channels decreasing as they move toward the center channel. (inverse/negative nearness distribution)
  • Full right turn is max vol on center channel with decreasing levels as them move toward the outer channels (original nearness distribution)

hopefully that makes sense?

15 Likes
#62

Interesting how this has progressed while I’ve slept over here on the other side of the world.

I’ve got some radically different ideas for this though, which I’ll sketch up over the weekend I think, based around norns as the beating heart of a modern, minimal, digital mixer.

But I do like the how the analog design above has progressed.

Question for discussion : what do we feel about break-out boxes for i/o? So the mixer becomes the control surface box in front of you, connected (via ribbon, whatever) to the i/o box mounted more strategically near gear. The i/o box can be as big as needed to cater for big jacks (could even come in different flavours - 1/4", XLR, 1/8", etc.), freeing up the control surface box to be more minimal.