[sdiy] modular synth controller

[ASSI]

On Monday 12 January 2004 16:15, Rude 66 wrote:
> the only other solution i can think of, would be installing a large
> touch screen as a second monitor on your pc, and running the vst
> synth on it. like those touch screen ticket machines in public
> transport. the roland v-synth has a large screen that works
> surprisingly well. but we'd be talking 15 or 17 inch here.

I've vented the touch-screen ideas several times. As you would probably 
like to use the touch screen with your fingers and not with a stylus, 
the current crop of M$-endorsed tablet PC is a no-go, which is a shame, 
as you can get one of these (the Via EZ30M) for under $1000. Also, the 
finger is not precise enough for many of the VST instrument skins that 
I've seen.

I've recently bought a Casio PV460 specifically to make a MIDI 
controller from it's touch screen. I haven't figured out yet if I can 
coerce the UART in the thing to put out MIDI directly. You wouldn't 
want to put a complete skin on 160x160 monochrome pixels, though.

Last but not least, modular controllers are possible: consider a 
lab-on-a-board type arrangement of power and data bussing. You can then 
plug in any controller (like endless encoder, slider or CV in) anywhere 
onto this backplane. The controllers self-organize into a logical chain 
so that each one has a time-slot to insert and extract data from the 
bus. Then of course you'd need some controller to make use of this data 
and "learn" to do new things. This is more expensive than doing the 
control surface directly, but done correctly you could simply yank the 
cutoff knob from the panel and put it someplace more convenient or tell 
it to let go of the cutoff and instead control the volume - all while 
the rest of your setup is operating completely undisturbed.


Achim.
-- 
+<[Q+ * Matrix-12 * WAVE#46 * microQkb/Omega * XTk/30 * sonic heaven]>+

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