The Best Desktop Motorised Control Surface Of All Time For Pro Tools - We Show You Why
If you’re currently in the market for a small form factor control surface, something with at least 8 faders, for Pro Tools then you are quite spoilt for choice these days. There are a number of affordable options available within this category all very capable of providing a solid, hands-on facility for interacting with Pro Tools:
Though control surfaces such as the FaderPort are all very good in their own right, many lack a sense of charm that a motorised 8 fader control surface from the past had in spades being the mighty Digidesign Digi 003 Factory.
In this video, we show you a selection of Digi 003 operations.
I consider the Digi 003 Factory to be the best motorised 8 fader control surface for Pro Tools of all time. After the Digi range of Digidesign audio interfaces and control surfaces were discontinued by Avid, a gap in the market opened up for third-parties to release their own takes on an 8 fader compact control surface. The top products available to us today, listed earlier, are all proof that these types of control surfaces are in fact quite popular in the audio production industry, but I feel none of them really captured the essence of the Digi 003, which I think is a real shame.
Don’t get me wrong, the Digi 003 wasn’t without its faults but what made it special was its deep integration with Pro Tools. Modern third-party control surfaces, of course, have to be cross-compatible with a range of popular DAWs, which is completely understandable, but the magic I feel when I use the Digi 003 isn’t in any of the offerings we have available today.
When I took delivery of it back in 2007 it felt like a proper premium product, in many ways it still does today. The 003 desk felt like a mini C24, which at the time cost over £7,000. The Digi 003 had the same type of motorised faders as the C24, same digital dual-line scribble strip, same mushroom encoder caps but at a fraction of the price, and it was also an all-in-one solution including a very usable audio/MIDI interface and monitor control section.
It was a sad day when the Digi 003 discontinued, it was also a shame that we never saw a Digi 004. In some small way, all third party small form factor motorised control surfaces that followed the Digi 003 over the years were in some small way a little tribute to the Digi. Without the popularity of the Digi 003, not forgetting the previous Digi 002, we may not have even had so many small control surfaces available to us today.
Digi 003, we salute you.
The Digi 003 is a firewire 400 device. Over the years technology has evolved with modern computers and interfaces making good use of the benefits of Thunderbolt. If you own an old firewire audio interface there is a way to get these legacy devices working which we explain in our article Is It Possible To Get Firewire 400 Devices To Work With Thunderbolt 3 USB-C And Breathe Life Back Into Our Old Audio Interfaces?