The Hot Palette, MIDI and FX Automation

In the development of NuVerb, Lexicon spent some time and effort satisfying the conflicting requirements of having a system that is easy to use while also offering substantial flexibility and control to the user. We've all seen plenty of examples of hardware and software that will do a lot but is really hard to get around, as well gear that is really easy to use except it doesn't offer much choice. The NuVerb interface screens, described above, with their layers of detail, are excellent examples of how to make a lot of detail easily accessible while also keeping the overview readily at hand.

Operationally, however, such screens suffer from the same problems as other less elegant interfaces. Suppose you are working in the Dual Mono mode, and really like to tweak Room Size Parameters for every little change. If you use the screens, you'll be constantly alternately opening and closing Effect A and Effect B, activating the Room Size Fader, and tweaking it. A tedious pain after about the 25th such double tweak. With a system this complex, it's impossible for the manufacturer to guess which controls you are going to use the most, and so Lexicon has created the Hot Palette, which has a default set of controls that they think would be useful. More to the point, they've made it possible for you to program these controls, and even better, to specify the controls any way you want. In the above case, you'd simply assign both Effect A and Effect B Room Size Faders to Hot Palette Fader 1, say, and then you'd always have this control capability at hand. It gets even better. Suppose you really like to tweak just between the range of 23 and 27 cubic meters. You can scale the Hot Palette Fader range so that full down is 23 and full up is 27 (or you could have different scaling for the different effects). You can even do inverse scaling, which means that you can in essence crossfade from one effect to the other, or one value set to another.

So, as you get into the heat of production, 10 minutes of setup work allows you to customize some of your favorite patches so they really dance to your tune. All of this can be saved, so that for future work, you just call up the same stuff. Nice.

Further control can be handed over to an external MIDI controller, such as Lexicon's MRC-1, giving you a handy programmable remote unit. Also, if you wish, you can automate everything to MIDI Time Code or SMPTE. I didn't try this, but it looks fabulous for post-production work. The wide variety of small room ambience programs in the default library make this unit a natural for use in audio-for-video post. Programs like "Big-to-Small" and "Dry-to-Wet" allow crossfades that can be automated to follow zooms, pans and jump cuts. Simple and powerful, once you have made your peace with the time code and synchronization stuff.