[sdiy] Chaotic/lo-fi patching techniques

[Magnus Danielson]

From: "beschaving at gmail.com" <beschaving at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Chaotic/lo-fi patching techniques
Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:21:15 +0200
Message-ID: <FC7D1D9C-6B38-4EDF-9D3F-64CD9E87284F at gmail.com>

> On Apr 8, 2008, at 11:24 AM, Tom Bugs wrote:
> 
> > Licked fingers (or maybe just sweaty) or other body parts (ooo-er) will provide much higher resistances! --- earthworms are exactly the same idea, but isn't it a bit cruel?
> > -- you can make a patchbay kind of like a cracklebox touchplate -- this can be great fun to play.
> 
> Has anyone here tried to make their own touchplate controller?
> 
> I've seen the Buchla and Serge touchplate keyboards, as well as the much smaller Crackle Box one, but how would one DIY one of these?
> 
> Is there maybe some company out there that makes custom-designed touch plate things on a one-off basis? That would be interesting to find out. Kind of Schaeffer does for frontpanels...

They are not that complex really. There are a few principles but neither of
them is particular hard. The EMS KS keyboard has a particular benefit in that
it does not require direct electrical contact with the finger, since it
measures the capacitance, so they have a nice printed decal over the PCB
layout. It uses standard TTL for scanning using a clever tecnique. This also
include the transpose-keys, which actually is quite cute.

Cheers,
Magnus