Link: Reloop | Price: $149/€129/£110 | Quick Start Guide: PDF
INTRODUCTION
Over the last few years the all-in-one market has gotten pretty crowded with clones and look-a-likes. It’s hard to be differentiated in the world of two wheels and a crossfader, so most manufacturers are (finally) starting to embrace the secondary controller market full force. With the Neon, Reloop is trying to provide a solid feature set to the turntable market, giving them really solid access to almost every secondary feature of Serato DJ that their turntables and mixer can’t handle. There are almost no products on the market that directly compete with the Neon at the amount of features for the price, except maybe the Serato Remote for the iPad, but even that doesn’t have access to Flips.
OUT OF THE BOX
The Reloop Neon is like someone cut the pad section off of the Vestax VCI-380, made it a little bigger and gave it a whole lot more stuff. The box comes with everything you need to get started, including a USB MINI to 2 USB (B) cable. You can chain two Neons together with a line cable, much like two Dicers, but with all the extra LEDs it needs some extra oomph. I would have preferred a USB micro connector, but that’s only because I have so damn many of those already. You don’t need to connect both USB (B) ends to the computer if you’re using only one, so feel free to swap it out for your own USB mini cable. Once its connected you get a really bright, really pretty light show as it boots and it drops you into the default modes.
There is a lot printed on this thing. The major downside of a controller like this is just how modal it is, and how much it does with as few buttons as possible. I give Reloop credit for trying to force all of this functionality into such a small controller, but the features kind of get lost in all of the print on the controller. Each mode button has at least two modes, some have three. The Bank/Deck buttons have different functionality based on what mode you’re in, and the mode LEDs around the pads are only on if you’re in the Sampler mode. Changing them requires using the Sampler/Control buttons, which do completely different things if you’re not in Sampler mode. We’ll dig deeper into this in the next section.
As mentioned above, the Reloop Neon’s LEDs are bright and crisp. I wish every controller I had looked this sleek. The smaller buttons on the left and right trigger accurately no matter where you press it, the longer mode buttons do not trigger on either extreme side without a lot of force, but trigger very easily when pressed in the middle. The two endless encoders have a good, noticeable click when pressed, though they feel very loose on the body. They turn very quickly, without a lot of resistance, and the clicks are very shallow as they turn. Personally, I like a very heavy encoder, like encoders on the Native Instruments controllers, but this gets the job done.
IN USE
Before I could really get started, I had to sit down with the quick reference guide on Serato’s website. I was hoping for a deeper, more complete manual, but my google-fu brought me nothing. The quick start guide explains the basic controls of the Neon, and is required reading for anyone who purchases this controller. In fact, I’d say go and read it anyway just to see how Reloop and Serato got all of this powerful functionality into one little box.
I only have an SL2, so I wasn’t able to take advantage of its 4 deck capability, but I was able to work with almost every feature it has available. The pads respond very well to triggers for cue points. The velocity sensitivity is, for lack of a better term, extremely sensitive. Using Pad FX took some adjustment, since I wanted to press a lot harder, but a very light touch is all that’s needed. In the studio that’s not an issue, but in a club it can become a little more frustrating since everything is multiplied by a thousand. Just keep a gentle touch and you’ll get everything you need out of it.
The modes go as follows:
Sampler
Shift + Sampler – Velocity Sensitive sampler
Double Press Sampler – Pad FX
Slicer
Double Press Slicer – Looped Slicer
Hotcue
Shift + Hotcue – Quantize Toggle
Double Press Hotcue – Flips
Hot Loop
Double Press Hot Loop – Manual Loop
You can control one deck at a time, or the SP-6 Sampler. When you enter Sampler mode the whole controller changes its functionality, with the exception of the Loop knob, which continues to control the loop of the last deck you were controlling. You can change the sample type, its trigger method, and you get feedback right on the controller. You can control the total Sampler volume, and the slot volume, depending on the button combination. You can load a sample from the browser into a SP-6 slot, but you can’t load a loop from a deck into the sampler. This one feature is, to me, pretty much required to DJ using the sampler. Without that feature I still need a mouse, whereas if I could just do that I could almost entirely avoid using my computer directly at all. Serato, Reloop, whoever is out there, please fix this. The velocity sensitive triggers are very similar to the Pad FX, only in that the pads are extremely sensitive. As mentioned above, just be careful.
In Sampler mode you have access to the 6 slots of all 4 banks of the SP-6. That alone makes this controller a compelling product, since there aren’t many options at this price that give that to you, if you don’t already have an all-in-one.
Slicer Mode, and Looped Slicer, work exactly as would be expected. I can’t stress how great the LEDs look, though. In fact, all of the other modes work very well. I am really iffy on the Hot Loops name, but it does give you access to a whole other layer of features that most controllers don’t give you. You can set a loop using the encoder, switch to Hot Loops, save it, and keep on going. Then you can still go to h and have access to all 8 of your hotcues, with the GUI on the software updating appropriately.
The new Serato feature everyone’s talking about is Flip, and the Reloop Neon unlocks it. You don’t need to be in Flip mode to use Flips, thankfully, but you do need to be there to save or recall your Flips. All of the Flips functionality requires you to hold down Shift, and then select any of the bank buttons (1-4). Button 1 activates recording, though nothing gets recorded until you hit your first pad. Button 2 starts the current Flip, button 3 toggles loop on and off, and button 4 turns the flip on and off. We will be doing a deeper review of Flip, and I don’t want to dig too deep into the functionality here and bog down a hardware review. I was frustrated at needing to hold the shift button down to access a primary function, but that’s not really the Neon’s fault. It’s just the way these things need to go when a software feature is put into a piece of hardware after it has been designed.
As far as the control modes, it gives you access to just about everything. You don’t have pitch control via any of the knobs, but you do have a sync button and if you are putting this next to a bigger controller then you have no real need for pitch control. You can swap your timecode between relative and internal, but I really wish there was an Absolute mode option to toggle through as well (but I have no idea where they’d put it). You can censor, and activate Slip mode, all with the side buttons.
The only other controller I’ve used Flips on is the Numark NV, and that was only for a brief time while I was hanging out at the DJWORX studio around BPM. The feature is a lot clearer on the Neon, though I have not tried it on the other controllers where it’s available, like the AFX and the DDJ-SX2. All in all, it is added pretty intuitively to a controller that is just jam-packed with features.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The Neon is a great entrance into a secondary controller for Reloop. My big frustration with a lot of modular, or secondary controllers, in the market is they try to be all things to all people. They attempt to handle every single feature of a software, and while the Neon has crammed a LOT of features into its small frame, it does not attempt at all to handle basic transport. The Neon shines as a supplement for your turntables, CD decks, and a mixer, or an older controller like the VCI-300 which doesn’t offer any of its included features. You don’t need to use every feature, but if you want to they are there. If you don’t, if you only need the SP-6 and looping, those are here as well, and they are really easy to use. I was looking for this to minimize my interaction with my laptop, and it delivered almost perfectly. I say almost because I really need that instant-doubles to the SP-6, and an Absolute Mode switch would have just been a nice added touch. I didn’t have a chance to try the Neon specific stand, nor two Neons at once, but if I was a heavy Serato user with turntables I would jump at both of those opportunities.
I can’t stress enough how important it is with this controller to study the quick start guide. It’s not that the features in Serato are complicated, it’s just that this little controller handles a lot of stuff, and to use it properly you really need to understand it. Most all-in-ones or basic modular controllers are pretty self-explanatory on their face, but the Reloop Neon requires a little more work to get it to become an elegant control surface. Once you get the available controls figured out, though, you can do just about anything you need in Serato, and you don’t really need to touch the mouse or keyboard. That, really, is the highest praise I can put on the Reloop Neon: I can focus on my mixing and my hardware, without needing to really pay attention to my screen.
GALLERY
