C3 and Surface Pro 2 -- is Touch Screen a big plus for live playing?

I’m using C3 primarily with Xpand!2, Lounge Lizard and VB3 for my current gigs with an old 88es Novation controller. Lately I’ve come to think that it might be useful to control my volume and mix sliders on-screen with a touch capable PC. I cant spend the $$ on a Pro4, but do have Surface Pro 2 just sitting around so Im going to test it as a sound source this week.

This will be my latest foray into the “low dough, bang-for-the-buck gig rig for the working musician” test lab LOL.

Anyone out there tested a rig based on the Surface Pro 2 or similar Touch Screen PC? I’d love to hear your experiences!

Yes. I use a touchscreen for my live-rig too. It’s useful but sometimes connecting a mouse to it really speeds up the workflow. Anyway: For a live situation it’s totally sufficient.

BTW: controlling volumes on the touchscreen is possible but not very convenient. Sometimes you will hit the wrong fader although you might have an excellent touchscreen. But this has to do with resolution of your screen and the size of the controllers in Cantabile.

I use a touch screen live, on a long cable to my Brix PC in my rack. I use the touch functionality live mostly for custom buttons in Cantabile for next/previous song, panic, toggling live mode, toggling UI visibility of my tuner and level meter plugins and so on. I don’t think I’d try adjusting faders on screen live (I tend to have all that stuff pre-programmed or controllable via an expression pedal anyway).

As FantomXR said, it can be difficult to control the faders on screen. I use a Surface Pro 4 and about the only thing I touch when live is the custom buttons. Everything else I route from faders on my controller.

I would put that money toward a 49 or 61 key secondary controller with faders, knobs and maybe even some trigger pads. It will give you more flexability in your setup, and a keyboard stack always looks cool on stage! :slight_smile:

Agreed…found out this past weekend it is a little sketchy controlling volume sliders on screen because the VST I use mostly has such a small UI, probably due to the resolution of my 10 in screen (Surface Pro 2). I wish I could make the windows look bigger by lowering the screen res but it doesnt work that way for some reason.
I need to find a secondary controller with sliders and buttons to add to my controller apparently. Didnt want to have to do that as my goal is to create the smallest lightest gig rig possible :slight_smile:

My main gig machine doesn’t have touch-screen capability. My back-up (and former main machine) does. Honestly, I don’t utilize it much, I just feel more accurate and comfortable with the mouse. I agree touch is best for song selection and other select-y things, faders and knobs, not so much.

Btw re a little control surface, I bought a used Korg Nanokontrol for $35 and I’m totally digging it. It fits right on the laptop over the touch pad, in front of the keyboard.

Do you have the bluetooth version of nanokontrol? If it is a yes, is fine enough for live?

Hi, following advice from the forum (thanks to all who contributed) and a lot of research I went for an INTEL NUC PC and a touch monitor.

Why do that and not get a Tablet PC?. A decent spec tablet PC would have cost more than what.I purchased and still be less powerful (unless I missed a good tablet model!), and with very limited IO (typically most tablets I looked at only had one micro USB port.

I like having the touch screen on stage with the main PC tucked away inside the rack. I have the Touch screen mounted on my X stand so I can keep an eye on things, make changes on the fly if needed, and it can give me stage cues if needed. So it is a plus for me.

You can check out my rig (and many others) on the “show me” page.

Like others above, I would not use the Touch Screen for manipulation of parameters, i have my FC300 foot controller for that.

No, my nanoK is USB.

I worked with a NUC (Skull Canyon) for about half a year too. But in the end I sold it, because it was not powerful enough for what I’d like to do. So I checked the alternatives and I ended up with an MINI-STX Mainboard and a i7-7700k CPU (4,4GHz). This machine does everything I want but is still far away from its limit. And the nice thing: It was even cheaper than the whole skull canyon. I think I paid less than 400€ bucks for mainboard & CPU. Also the system has a much (!) better cooling performance than the NUC. I don’t hear the CPU-fan at all while the NUC was quite loud in some situations (doesn’t matter on stage though).

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Which case did you use?

It sits inside the keyboard :wink:

I only use normal computer components, they are much cheaper! I build my own case which is as small as possible. Without any onboard card and dvd drives this is not a big problem.

Whoa…mind blown!!!
Essentially a C3 powered workstation for live performance!? With peripheral outputs added?
I wonder if there’s room inside my Nektar 88 to do that :thinking: