Blog post time! This one talks a bit about working with hardware to write your music, as opposed to strictly a software workflow.

http://tarekith.com/soft-to-hard/

It's amazing a post titled "soft to hard" could ever make it past the spam filter. I'm getting stopped left and right. Cool article anyways. It seems like once someone goes software, they just goes more and more in that direction over time. I've had to stop myself a few times after spending ridiculous amounts of time drawing pitch-bends before remembering I could just turn on the controller and bend pitch by wrist-power alone, only taking as long as a single pass of the song.

This reminds me again of my procrastination toward getting more intimate with my midi controller. Map my axe to some of my many available knobs and faders, and actually USE them.

The problem is that I have to do setup work just get started, and then I have to get used to it once I'm going. Meanwhile, I'm a lean, mean sound design machine with my mouse and keyboard. I still need to do this at some point, as being hands-on will reap benefits, but... damn.

Regarding the article, I'm half-and-half with you. On one hand, I entirely buy into the thought that changing your method, and removing the visual cues will yield different, possibly better, results. On the other hand, the downsides of the hardware interfaces and other shortcomings make me feel that overall, going hardware is a sketchy proposition.

Wouldn't it be better to dedicate to a primary VST(rather than a collection), map it to a controller, and master that vst + controller? Seems like you gain some of the benefits of the hardware paradigm while avoidig lots of the drawbacks.

I've never found the same ease of use with a controller and VSTs personally. Having to map things ahead of time, hoping that those are the parameters I will want tweak later on always bugged me.

Hmmm... After considering use of midi-controllers I decided to buy Novation Zero SL MkII Remote (or whatever it's proper name). And I never regret it. It works perfectly with Ableton Live. And after placing it directly in front of me, I now use it very often. Because it's really much easier (or maybe more satisfactory) to use a knob to adjust frequency on a filter or threshold on a compressor.