What's new

What touchscreen is Hans Zimmer using here to control Cubase?

It's supposedly made by 3M

https://cdm.link/2012/10/interview-...musical-instruments-hans-zimmer-collaborator/

You also mentioned that you developed some touch screen technology?

That’s another element of the way we work. We’ve been using touch screens since 2004, starting off with a little Windows CE panel that had buttons to do shortcuts for Cubase. We gravitated to an XP-based system in ’06, and then, recently, for The Dark Knight Rises we’ve just put in a really nice 22-inch 3M multi-touch screen that runs with Windows 7. You can create all sorts of faders, shortcut keys, and little sequence oriented things. Originally, some people said, “Why don’t you just use the iPad for this?” And although the iPad’s really nice, it’s quite a small display if you want to have a lot of controls visible at once.
 
Some years ago I thought bigger touchscreens will soon flood the market and will become affordable. Well, I was wrong. Although market is growing now, bigger touchscreen-monitors are still very expensive.

The one we can see on pictures of Hans Zimmer sitting in his studio (since 2012) is a 3M-Monitor. The software behind it was created just for him, although Junkie XL has one too now. As far as I know 3M is B2B only, no consumer products.

Magedok offers portable multi-touch monitors up to 15.6 Inch for quite reasonable prices. You'll find them on amazon. If money doesn't matter you can probably do some cool stuff with Microsofts Surface Studio ;)

But there is another problem:
Liine Lemur and TouchOSC are Apps for Tablets running iOS or Android. Any tablet going beyond 10.8 inch? As far as I know the bigger ones are all running windows.

Beside that I haven't seen any DAW-desktop-software getting optimized for touchscreen anyway. Some claim to, but there are always some user interface elements that are just to tiny.

IMHO you need some creativity to get something similar using software like MAX (Cycling74).
 
There are a lot of options these days but as Stefa said large touchscreens can still be quite pricey. I'm currently using an iPad / Metagrid but the small screen is becoming somewhat limiting with the number of commands I can use. I would love to upgrade to the ipad pro 12.9 but that is also stupidly expensive!
 
Some years ago I thought bigger touchscreens will soon flood the market and will become affordable. Well, I was wrong. Although market is growing now, bigger touchscreen-monitors are still very expensive.

The one we can see on pictures of Hans Zimmer sitting in his studio (since 2012) is a 3M-Monitor. The software behind it was created just for him, although Junkie XL has one too now. As far as I know 3M is B2B only, no consumer products.

Magedok offers portable multi-touch monitors up to 15.6 Inch for quite reasonable prices. You'll find them on amazon. If money doesn't matter you can probably do some cool stuff with Microsofts Surface Studio ;)

But there is another problem:
Liine Lemur and TouchOSC are Apps for Tablets running iOS or Android. Any tablet going beyond 10.8 inch? As far as I know the bigger ones are all running windows.

Beside that I haven't seen any DAW-desktop-software getting optimized for touchscreen anyway. Some claim to, but there are always some user interface elements that are just to tiny.

IMHO you need some creativity to get something similar using software like MAX (Cycling74).
Well, there's a new player on the OSC scene which could technically run on any touchscreen size since it's web based. See more info there: https://vi-control.net/community/th...l-an-alternative-to-lemur-and-touchosc.72643/

It's a bit trickier to set up at first and maybe a bit more technical to achieve what you want to do compared to TouchOSC, but it is much more flexible. And given it's web based, anything is touch and can show a web page will do. I jumped from TouchOSC to that recently, and can't be more pleased. And in contrary to the 2 others (Lemur/TouchOSC), Open Stage Control is well maintained and actively supported by its dev these days.
 
The one we can see on pictures of Hans Zimmer sitting in his studio (since 2012) is a 3M-Monitor. The software behind it was created just for him, although Junkie XL has one too now. As far as I know 3M is B2B only, no consumer products.
If I am not mistaking I think I heard JXL mention on his YouTube that he uses a touchscreen from Dell these days. But I don't think Dell produces this specific model anymore. Would still need the custom made software though.
 
Just a heads-up, touchscreens have ergonomic issues. You need it close enough to touch, and you're going to be leaning over it.

I grappled with that when I designed and built a custom desk for a composer/producer who uses a Slate system, and I've heard of other people who find it uncomfortable.

So I'm not saying don't do it or that it's an insurmountable problem, just that I'd think long and hard before taking that leap.
 
If I am not mistaking I think I heard JXL mention on his YouTube that he uses a touchscreen from Dell these days. But I don't think Dell produces this specific model anymore. Would still need the custom made software though.

Correct, they don't make it anymore. It's this model shown in this video. We picked it specifically because of how it folds down a la the Surface Studio, very ergonomic. You can find them for pretty cheap on eBay...usually about $200.

And yeah, the software is the RCP one built by Mark Wherry. It's pretty cool, has some nifty features I haven't seen in other commercial offerings (not sure if I can speak about it here so I won't...maybe Hans will be kind enough to chime in). When I was doing the touch screen thing on my own rig, though, I got a lot of mileage out of building a template in Max/MSP and it got pretty crazy. Max isn't multi-touch (unless you run it on an iPad via Mira), but since I was just using it for buttons and the occasional utility fader, it didn't matter.

You can do absolutely insane things in Max. Since I don't like MIDI keyboards with lots of shit on them (I like it pushed right up against the desk like you see Hans and Tom do it), one thing I used Max for was parsing and manipulating the MIDI data as it came in to Max before it got to Cubase, sometimes aping features that you might see built into controllers, sometimes doing stuff you could never really do any other way but is incredibly useful, like "push a button and now CC1 controls my velocity," or just puts a cap on it (the value CC1 is set becomes the highest maximum velocity), stuff like that. Could also make one fader do different things very easily -- now it sends CC1, now it sends CC1 only up to 64, now it sends CC1 and CC2 (for vibrato with CSS) together, but CC2 has a slight delay on it and scales at 60% of what CC1 is doing...all switchable via a button. It makes for a very quick workflow, and as far as I remember even Mark's software can't do stuff like that.

Before I got fed up with having too much gear and basically threw everything out to start over from the ground up, I had thought of using my monome to control Max, parsing MIDI data further with Javascript or Python, making sequencers in Max that can spit MIDI notes to Cubase (basically, writing tools for coming up with interesting pitch/rhythmic patterns I'd probably never arrive at otherwise), stuff like that. Planning on getting back to that at some point but we'll see, it gets exhausting when it all seems limitless.

IMO this direction is way more interesting and useful than a big bright screen with some buttons for key commands you can't remember on it.
 
Hans is wearing a suite made of satin from no one else than Armaniac. Notice those red lapelles, it makes the whole outfit shine. And his scarfe, sublime! And take a look at his beautiful wife! She's wearing a white Visage dress specially tailored for her. She looks stunning! Isn't she? Fabulous!
 
  • Haha
Reactions: 3DC
It’s custom software, designed by Mark Wherry I believe. But it’s primarily sending shortcuts to Cubase, which you can do several different ways. I use Lemur on iPad but Lemur isn’t really supported anymore.
 
Top Bottom