COMPARA
TIVE REVIEW
NOVATION LAUNCHPAD VS. AKAI APC20 WORDS BY TREY YANCY
Ableton Live is an excellent solution for music creation and improvisation but to take full advantage of its capabilities in a live or fast-paced studio setting, a mouse and a keyboard simply are not sufficient. What is needed is a dedicated external controller designed specifically to support Ableton Live. Two such controllers are the Launchpad from Novation and Akai’s APC20, both of which give you the control you are looking for and both are available at the very comfortable price of $199.
What do they do?
With Ableton Live, all audio and MIDI recordings are treated as separate, synched clips that can be manipulated in either a traditional timeline or a grid of clips arranged by tracks and scenes. As with traditional DAW applications, an entire song can be played straight through while accompanied by live virtual instruments, but Live also allows you to
record and fire clips improvisationally and in perfect synch as you build and perform a captivatingly rich performance in real time.
The number of clips, tracks and scenes can be huge, particularly with orchestral scores, and you need to be able to easily navigate around this potentially enormous grid with ease while still controlling volume levels, sends, effects, panning and the like. By providing a grid of backlit touch pads and related buttons (most of which change color according to function), these controllers provide immediate access to these functions and make it possible to operate Ableton Live with only rare glances at the screen.
The Novation Launchpad
The approach of the Launchpad is rather straightforward: Create a device in a form factor that is equally at home on stage and in the studio, squeeze in as much
functionality as possible, and provide it at a price that will appeal to virtually all Live users. Rather than following Akai’s approach of having dedicated sections of controls for various functions, the Launchpad has a series of buttons along the top and right edges that determine the function of the main 8x8 pad array, which changes according to the task at hand. Depending on the mode, it serves as a clip launcher, a navigator, a mixer, and more. Two user modes are also available, which (among other things) can turn the array into a set of drum pads or sample triggers. The backlit pads change color to indicate clips that are cued, playing and record enabled, and they glow at three separate intensities to indicate such things as instrument velocity settings.
The multifunction approach to the pad array has many advantages, one being the ability to stop a single clip without killing an entire track or scene. Its large pads,
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