Zoom-in Online

When I first received the Dexter, I have to admit I was a little excited. The growing field of touch screen technology has a lot of potential, and when presented with nothing more than a 12” blank touch screen surface, my mind flexed that potential and to me, the possibilities seemed endless. I’m sure that when it all started, the possibilities seemed endless to JazzMutant engineers as well. I wonder what it was that changed their minds.

For a little full disclosure, I was expecting more. However, I feel that it is not my place to simply pan an item for the things that I hoped it would do, so to start, lets run down what it does do, some of which it does really well.

Setup was a snap. A simple driver installation and a couple of steps outlined in a very easy to follow quick start guide and I had Logic controls at my fingertips. The interface itself is very self-explanatory. The faders controlled the faders, the pan controlled pan, etc. etc. All in all it only took me about 20 minutes to reach the extent of what the Dexter could do. But in that lies part of the problem.

Dexter gives you basic control over your DAW. However some things that would be really handy in a controller, you still have to go back to Logic to create. The most obvious to me was creating auxs and inserting effects. With the ability to control a send’s level, and with Logic’s ability to automatically create an aux track, it would seem simple to put two and two together and allow Dexter to select a bus, create the aux track, even let you scroll thru a list of available plug ins and select the one you want. At the very least let me double tap the EQ field and load a Channel EQ for me. Alas, at this point we are still relegated to the mouse.

Dexter also gives you two different views for controlling effects parameters; neither of which really gets the job done. The first aligns all of the controllable parameters in a fader-controlled window. For most plug-ins, the names that appeared above each controller were accurate, but the fader controls did not translate well when compared against the easy to manipulate GUI that the Logic windows provide. The second is some sort of X/Y field that I thought would act similar to a chaos pad, but in many cases, the X parameter and Y parameter were not totally related, and variable throw touch control doesn’t translate well to on/off only parameters or the selection parameters like the reverb type in the Guitar Amp Pro plug in for example.

The multi-touch response of the unit is really good however. In the EQ window I was able to manipulate frequency and gain for four different filters in a pretty quick real time, giving me what would be a great effect if I were a DJ performing at a rave. And the bull’s-eye style surround sound mixer is a brilliant addition, allowing you to place tracks in space and manipulate them one at a time or in relation to one and other. My only issue here is that ten inputs at once sound great in theory, but when the best way to touch the surface is with the tip of your fingernail (a tip that is included in the manual by the way), it becomes a challenge against human anatomy.

The Dexter does what a basic control surface should do, just maybe not what you want it to do. And when it comes down to it, it is fun to be able to touch an LCD screen and have faders and parameters respond. Anyone who has ever used a touch screen Point of Sale system will be rocking and rolling in no time, but for the over $3000 price tag, this guy needs to do more than order me a sandwich.