© Steve Jennings

P.I. Engineering X-Keys, which are, according to Ian Kuhn, "programmable keyboards and/or button banks,” Kuhn says. “We took the 16-button X-Keys Stick, opened it up, broke the traces on the circuit board after the eighth key and rewired keys 9 to 16 to trigger events in our console using the Avid Profile’s GPI interface. The first eight keys are connected to our stage computer via USB and trigger macros we’ve programmed that do things like jumping from song to song in our cues database or switching between cues and Smaart.”