Controller Module Brainstorming
2000-03-26 by Fred Becker
I just noticed the W--- synth compay has a "controller module" shown on their home page: http://www.wiard.com/index.html Others have pointed this out before. It has two joy sticks, a patch bay and a voltmeter. It fits in a 19" rack, so it is not really purely modular with their system in a design sense, but rather an "add on." I'd rather like to see the MOTM one be two or three spaces, with two joysticks, two ribbon controllers and possibly some generic CV knobs, with CV outs for all. What is the current idea for this module? Does it have a number yet? Another concept would be a for a controller module to make use of all five fingers of the hand. Such a module might be a four-space module with small sloping indentations and five small ribbon controllers for the hand, laid out in a hand shape. Pure manual control! [Oh, and a big knob in the center of the thing which rotates with the palm, for volume control or something. Or maybe the whole assembly with the five controllers could be mounted in a circular housing which rotates by wrist control. That is probably going overboard]. Instead of ribbon controllers, which might be hard to get, five smallish mod wheels could be arranged in a hand pattern. Another option is just five joysticks. They could have thimble attachments for better grip. Perhaps the simplest approach to this would be five slider controls such as found on a mixer. Perhaps the hand pattern could be dispensed with and just four sliders could be mounted parallel vertically. Of course everyone would want two modules, one for each hand. Oh, maybe there could be four sliders for the fingers, and one joystick for the thumb. Such a controller would be a fun way to control a sequencer, for instance. Each finger could control the pitch of a tone or group of tones in a sequence. Or they could control cutoff frequencies on a bank of filters. Tentochi and others were talking about this in January: Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 01:28:30 -0500
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From: "Tentochi" <tentochi@...> Subject: [motm] Joystick/Controller panel requested Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-UIDL: bfid9lcKe9"'P!!Ge>e9 I am EXTREMELY interested in having an MOTM joystick. Should it be a satellite box to which it is connected to its own 1U control panel? Or should there be 2 or 3 mounted on a 2U panel? I would also like to see a control panel (I know I have mentioned this before) with essentially buttons, switches and sliders on it is some ergodynamic, novell layout. --Shemp And Steve wrote this in February: Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 11:20:59 EST From: RevTor@... Subject: [motm] Hello list (LONG) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-UIDL: ,IBe9$Dnd9'n\!!n<ed9 (snip) I had ideas for a few cool modules last night.. Ill give brief rundowns and if any one wants any more info just ask.. (snip) The second idea I had was for a maybe 4 or 5 u wide panel with a matrix of LED's that you could control by row or column with CV's to make them light up and switch color etc... Might not be too practical or useful, but would be cool, no? Third Idea was for a controller. All analog, all CV's/trigs. Instead of a keyboard, how about a giant piece of ribbon controller surface maybe 8 by 15 or 12 by 12 inches for equal x-y axis response. You could play it with a finger or maybe even get a method for it to read how many and where your fingers touched down on the plate and then the CV's would track your fingers. Polyphonic ribbon controller. but you'd need outs for each finger.. hmm gonna have to think about this one a little.. maybe two panels side by side, separate one for each hand. Ok, we could limit it to two fingers.. would be fun ~Steve The archives have a lot of prior discussion about joystick and controller modules. Larry Hendry was building one DIY. Is it completed, Larry? Other talk has been about rotary switches for various functions. Fred