MOTM

Here's a quick post on my first impressions of the Doepfer ribbon 
controller. I built a +/- 12V stepdown circuit and hooked it up 
awhile ago, and have played with it for about 30 minutes.

There's a lot to like about this thing. It's a nice size, 23.5" long 
and about 1" wide, with all but 3" of the length taken up by 
the 'ribbon' element. It was heavier than I expected, and is encased 
in a sturdy steel U channel body. Actually, there is no ribbon at 
all, in the Moog sense - just a smooth clear plastic surface covering 
the touch elements. I find that the playability is actually better 
than a Moog ribbon, because you don't have to deflect the ribbon down 
1/4" to make contact.

There's a nice pressure output that works pretty well, too. It is 
more sensitive than many of the pressure sensors on Roland keyboards, 
which tend to be either full on or off with little control in between.

There are two gate outputs. One fires when you touch the ribbon and 
one when you cross an adjustable pressure threshold. In addition, you 
can set the ribbon to hold the last voltage once you release it. 
Unfortunately, you give up the main gate output in return.

I had some nits to pick also:
Packaging wise, they chose to put the cable end of the ribbon to the 
right. That's just plain wrong in my book. Also, I don't like the 
raised box on that end which houses the connector. It would have been 
better to make it flush or lower profile somehow. They use a USB 
connector to connect the ribbon to the module, but warn that you will 
fry everything if you plug anything into actual USB devices. I think 
that's a poor choice of connector. Also, the 4 foot cable included is 
too chintzy in length to let you move the ribbon where you may want 
it. Hell, my modular is more than 4 feet high!

Feature wise, it bugs me that you lose the gate output when you turn 
on the cv hold feature. That should not be necessary, and I'm going 
to look into modding it. My guess is that they did this because of 
the extreme simplicity of the support circuitry - there's a quad 
opamp and not much else there.

Also, I want a mode to mimic the Yamaha ribbons on the CS-80, which 
can take the first position you press on the ribbon as the home 
position, and all movement after that as offsets from the initial 
position. I plan on looking into a mod for that as well.

You can do hammer-on techniques with 2 fingers, and the controller 
reacts in a last-finger manner, but the voltages you get are a little 
strange. They are sometimes not the same as they would be when using 
only 1 finger at the same position.

This thing may be worth making a Stooge panel for...

Anyway, it's loads of fun!

Moe