Electra One Mini vs. Mk2/Mk3

General discussion
1

I’ve only recently discovered the Electra One and am currently thinking it might be the workflow saviour I’ve been looking for.
Like many, I much prefer the hands on approach of music production, avoiding mouse and touchscreen wherever possible. Meaning I’m a big fan of MIDI controllers, and use them often to control my DAW and plugins.The frustration I have is that it is VERY hard to find a controller that is gerenal enough to use with all types of plugins - it might not have enough banks to map to all the parameters, it may not follow a logical layout similar to the plugin, and of course the big one: most controllers don’t dynamically label parameter names. Like others I’ve thought about buying the E16 or a Faderfox, but they too are a little bit of a compromise. My understanding of the Electra One is that it can be very easily set up to be an intermediary device that maps to and dynamically labels ALL my plugins’ parameters and then allows me to use ANY MIDI controller of my choice for control. And I can create ‘pages’ in the E1 to cycle through plugin parameter groups and have them show up on the screen in a layout matching my external MIDI controller.

My first question to you guys is: have I got this right? (initially I thought it was too good to be true but my reading suggests this is exactly what it does).

Then my second question is: with this being my primary use case, what are the advantages of gettting the E1 Mk2/Mk3 vs. the more compact Mini? Especially as I’m not a big fan of using touchscreens in my workflow. The obvious advantage is the real estate on the screen allowing for more paramaters/controls on each ‘page’, but is there anything else that differentiates the two that I should be aware of?

2

What DAW(s) do you use? And which other MIDI controllers might you want to use with an Electra One? That would help the community answer your first question.

If you look at the Electra One website under “integrations”, you’ll see some info on DAW(& other software) -specific integrations.

3

I use Studio One mainly, with an Atom SQ, Faderport and Korg NanoStudio.
But I’d generally set up custom mapping to the VST instruments - I wouldn’t need the E1 to interfere much with the DAW control as the Presonus gear takes care of that well

4

There is no integration for the Studio One. If map your instruments manually, there should not be any problems. You would first design and create presets (or one preset with multiple pages) and then map them to the VST instruments.

Regarding the touch - on the mk1/mk2, the touch is really meant to perform simple actions such as toggling the on-screen buttons, to switch preset pages, etc. The knobs are the primary means to change parameter values. We will keep this design principle on the mk3 too. The touchscreen, however, will be much more responsive, so that users who want to use it for the parameter value control will get better performance.

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