For a long time now I’ve been working an 8-fader midi controller that’s slightly smaller than a credit card. It started as a little gadget for Marc Weidenbaum, then I took off the pots and encoders, added a hardware midi output.
Then, I added an accelerometer and some little buttons.
Then, I connected it to a fork of Tom Armitage’s excellent web-based editor for his 16n faderbank, which was obviously a big inspiration for the whole project.
Along the way, I wrote the firmware in Circuit Python, then scrapped all that and rewrote it in Arduino. So much work for such a simple thing.
If you want to buy one, it’s still a long way off - at least one hardware revision caused by a combination of my own mistakes and the chipocalypse, no doubt many firmware fixes, and I have a nasty feeling it’s going to end up more expensive than I’d like.
But I’m now at the point where some beta testing would be valuable, so if you’re interested in helping out, apply to be a beta tester here.
Along the way, working on this little 🎚 thing inspired the much bigger 🎛 Control Eurorack module, which is doesn’t require any firmware at all, and definitely doesn’t have an online editor, so is now available as a £100 kit from Thonk.
Last weekend it was a joy to have 20+ builders from Qatar to California, including cellfactorysounds who took the picture above, join an online build workshop. I was in my shed in Herne Hill, Steve was at Thonk HQ in Brighton, and we had a 100% success rate (with one little fix yesterday).
I wrote a bit more about Control and Human Sized Musical Interfaces last year. What I haven’t done yet is update the ludicrous and unsustainable hand-coded musicthing.co.uk. Another time.
Reading and listening:
Digbee’s Electronic Chronicle, wonderful book of home made circuits and comic strip frames. Currently out of print (a reprint may be on the way) but a full PDF is available.
The Prince Estate’s The Story of Sign O' The Times podcast was even better than I possibly hoped [link]
Rebirth of Wonky by Christian Vogel, contains the self-explanatory When You Can't Go Clubbing Anymore And Have To Dance With Oaks [link]
Monolithic Undertow by Harry Sword: fun, epic, history of drone from prehistoric caves to La Monte Young and on [link]
Papers by Sarah Davachi, very good on devices (also interesting talk here) [link]
Balafon Sketches by Contours, gamelan & electronics in Cumbria [link]
Waves and Forms by Basile Zimmermann, an interesting, eccentric, academic book about electronic musicians in China in the early noughties. Chapter 10 describes Lao Li, whose instruments are a Roland VS-880 multitracker with no Chinese manual and several pairs of cheap Sennheiser headphones. [link]
Slower/Talker by Leo Chadburn, disorientating [link]
Land Waves by Snow Palms, uplifting [link]
If you think Ezra Teboul’s thesis A Method For The Analysis Of Handmade Electronic Music As The Basis Of New Works sounds interesting, you’d be right. [link]
Best wishes,
Tom