Best hardware controller for Zebra

[beej]

- beej, sorry about taking this discussion so much down to earth. your ideas are great, but i m afraid you r in for some heavy diy project. i'll rather take a good joystick (not pitch lever!) or a trackpad (like on moog voyager) together with poly aftertouch and decent wheels today than imagining some ultra sci-fi stuff for the future...

It's not about ultra-scifi - it's purely about a product where a design team have really through through the issues to come up with a much better product. A good example is the Logic/Mackie control.

Before that, the best anyone could do on a reasonable budget is come up with little 8-fader banks with crap faders which you could MIDI map to things - ie it was crap.

The design team sat down and though "We want a hardware controller for Logic. We want to be able to control the mixer, plugins, transport, lots of cool features in Logic, we want proper motorised touch-sensitive faders" etc and they designed the Logic Control - a great, well-thought out product that does what it sets out to do, at a reasonable price with reasonable compromises.

That is what I want someone do to with a bespoke synth controller. And with some technology around today, it should be doable.

Here's one of my ideas - ok, we are always going to have the problem of how many hardware fixed controls we have. So, if you take a look at the front of a Prophet-5 for instance, you can see we have knobs buttons, with panel labelling and grouping going "these knobs are for the envelopes", "these are for the filters" etc.

So, we have a sensible arrangement of knobs on our new control surface, but we make the *surface* of the controller a screen in itself, like a Lemur or whatever. That way, we can change the grouping/labelling according to purpose, around a fixed set of hardware controls.

In one mode, three knobs here are grouped and labelled "filter", but for another synth, the grouping/labelling expands to include to other knobs. That gives us the power of a reconfigurable surface, within the context of a fixed number of hardware controls. In short, we can reconfigure our controller to look like a P5, or a Minimoog, or a Zebra by making the panelling *around* the knobs change.

I'm not saying I have the solutions - you would really need to work through the issues and come up with the way forward.

But that's what I'd like to see happening...

[musiklov3r]

That's an interesting idea, Beej. I never would have thought of having the monitor be the surface and the knobs attached. You'd probably have to deal with the "lcd effect" of when you push on an lcd monitor it looks like water ripples, but there must be a way around that.

Previously I had been excited about touch screen technology as being the ultimate in reconfigurable and interactive controller display, but, I wonder if it will have the amount of accuracy and tactile feel I imagine. If it doesn't, having the hardware knobs and sliders with the monitor surface might be the perfect blend of reconfigurable controller. there was a company that made tablets out of macbooks. Unfortunately their new model requires a stylus (the last one did not.) I'd be curious to see if anyone tried to use the old one as a touch controller for soft synths.

And I don't think you are hijacking this thread. Your thoughts seem to be in line with my own, that there isn't anything out there yet that really fulfills the ideal controller need, or anything really close.

Hopefully members will continue to suggest current hardware controller configurations that might lead to an effective solution for me today. But ideas about what the future should bring might just inspire a hardware company to start thinking in the right direction.

Similarly, I spoke with a keyboard stand manufacturer at the Namm show who seemed to "get it." And indicated that they were open to new stand design ideas that might incorporate a way to mount controllers above the keyboards. Any other ideas along this line would be much appreciated and maybe when I follow up with the rep, something might be inspirational to them. Of course this is not something we can expect to make money off of, but wouldn't it be nice if the stand companies and or the hardware interface controller companies created new products based on our discussions. Or perhaps we posted these questions on all of the keyboard and synth boards and the consensus became obvious?

[beej]

That's an interesting idea, Beej. I never would have thought of having the monitor be the surface and the knobs attached. You'd probably have to deal with the "lcd effect" of when you push on an lcd monitor it looks like water ripples, but there must be a way around that.

Yeah - I'm not necessarily saying that it would be an effective solution, I'm just trying to show that some out of the box thinking might result in some better products, rather than all the "me too!" keyboards+knobs controllers out there.. There are all kinds of variations on this idea, but the chief idea here is to recofigure the displays *around* the hardware knobs to preset the fixed controls in different contextural groupings.

We want real hardware controls - as interesting as touch screens are, they aren't yet a sufficiently tactile replacement for "real" controls, though they hold some interesting possibilities and I'm sure the technology while continue to be refined and get cheaper to incorporate into products.

I have plenty of other ideas too, and I'm sure that people far smarter than me could do an excellent job if they decided it would be something that would work and sit down and work through the problems. I can see a boutique indepedent developer doing something like this, in a similar manner to, say the Haaken Continuum, or John Bowen's Solaris - custom made, exclusive and expensive, but when people see if working it would probably spark some demand to want something to move down the budget scale.

Anyway, all we got know is compromises, some better than others. I can make my gear to the maximum it's potential holds, but I really feel the *true* potential of this has been far from exploited...

Anyway, I've probably made my feelings sufficiently clear...!

[jpinnix]

I just received the newest Electronic Musician today and it has an article called UI:TNG about an interface exactly like some of you are describing. It's not on the web yet, but I searched and found the following news item about the same thing on Remix:
http://remixmag.com/production/music_bu ... ndex3.html

THE MAGIC SCREEN: NBOR & DENNY JAEGER
With the chief designer of the breakthrough '80s workstation the Synclavier II at the helm, upstart company NBOR (No Boundaries or Rules; www.nbor.com) is looking to change audio mixing as we know it. Acclaimed composer for films and commercials, Denny Jaeger is the man who envisions a seamless fusion of the best of both the hardware and software worlds.
Still in the prototype stage, the system begins with the Universal Interface Panel, a hardware box with a display screen on top (that will likely be touch-sensitive) that can plug into any computer. Through laborious research that has spanned four countries and spawned more than 30 patents, NBOR designed custom-made, touch-sensitive faders that move across the top of the screen itself, using NBOR's Blackspace software. Made with many original parts designed from scratch, the faders have a maximum resolution of 6,000 points per inch and use unique magnetic coupling to make precise automated movements. The system also includes stand-alone knobs that can be placed anywhere on the screen (or on other surfaces as many as six knobs at a time) to control any software function with a response time of less than 1 ms. "There's nothing else on planet Earth that can do this," Jaeger says.
NBOR's new tactile and software environment strips limitations from users. Any object down to a single pixel can be customized and moved anywhere on screen. Sessions use a context messaging system, so multiple people can contribute to the same session seamlessly and remotely with negligible delay. Blackspace sits on top of an operating system, so it's not constrained by the menus, windows, etc. of a Mac or Windows OS. "Everyone should have tools that are as creative as they want them to be," Jaeger says. There's no news yet about a release of NBOR's products, but many developments should be popping up this year.
— Markkus Rovito

[amoeba]

THE MAGIC SCREEN

wow - does sound cool. six knobs won't cut it, tho

[Mighty Pea]

Having seen MFM2's resizing and the large skin for Wusikstation 4, I'm really starting to feel sad about --as one person so succinctly it in this thread-- these wonderful products being stuck in a box, with no direct, natural means for us to interact with them. I'm really hoping for some fast development in Haptic Feedback for large, multitouch-screens, so prices can go down a LOT.

[Howard]

Somebody should write Zebra control (X/Y pads only) software for the iphone
Example: http://www.folabs.com/proremote.html

Two X/Y per page, four pages, wrapping

X/Y1 X/Y2
X/Y2 X/Y3
X/Y3 X/Y4
X/Y4 X/Y1

With multitouch, it could even have several modes, including e.g. jump back to previous position on release (control "trill") and smooth (with time and law). Recording and triggered playback, of course...

[nschmidt-dd]

Hi Howard,

there should be something "similar" already available. Have a look at http://www.itouchmidi.com/ ... iTM XYPad. A limited version is available for free: iTM MidiLab.

Did not test any of it though.

Cheers,
Norbert

[Howard]

Thanks Norbert

Do you think two pads on one screen would make them too small to control?

[nschmidt-dd]

You are welcome

for me I could even imagine four little pads (slim fingers ). So two shouldn't be a problem. I guess I have to give it a try soon. It seems the vendor is even willing to accept feature requests.

Cheers
Norbert

[psychematic]

I'm right now prototyping a MIDI controller that I'm building out of four laptop touchpads. I'll be reporting back here once it's fully functional.

[kuniklo]

Programming a softsynth from a general purpose controller is never really going to be satisfying because you're never going to be able to map more than a fraction of the typical synth's params out and the rest of the time you'll be scrolling through lists of cryptically named params on a tiny LCD screen, if you're lucky.

I've given up on programming VIs from midi controllers. All I want now is a *really* nice performance controller. Give me a mod wheel and pitch stick as good as the Nords and an X-Y pad and a couple of really smooth, high-res knobs and faders and I'll be happy. NI's Kore is as close as anybody's come to getting this right so far, I think.

[Tarekith]

Programming a softsynth from a general purpose controller is never really going to be satisfying because you're never going to be able to map more than a fraction of the typical synth's params out and the rest of the time you'll be scrolling through lists of cryptically named params on a tiny LCD screen, if you're lucky.

I've given up on programming VIs from midi controllers. All I want now is a *really* nice performance controller. Give me a mod wheel and pitch stick as good as the Nords and an X-Y pad and a couple of really smooth, high-res knobs and faders and I'll be happy. NI's Kore is as close as anybody's come to getting this right so far, I think.

Agreed, it;'ll never be what we want,s o at least give me a really good quality controller in the meantime. 37 keys, 8 endless rotaries, mod and pitchwheels, all of it solid and made to last. None of this plastic crap.

[kuniklo]

Agreed, it;'ll never be what we want,s o at least give me a really good quality controller in the meantime. 37 keys, 8 endless rotaries, mod and pitchwheels, all of it solid and made to last. None of this plastic crap.

Yeah. Something like the Novation Remote SLs but with *much* better build quality and components. I don't care if that makes it expensive.

[pdxindy]

Agreed, it;'ll never be what we want,s o at least give me a really good quality controller in the meantime. 37 keys, 8 endless rotaries, mod and pitchwheels, all of it solid and made to last. None of this plastic crap.

Yeah. Something like the Novation Remote SLs but with *much* better build quality and components. I don't care if that makes it expensive.

I'd like it to have a high end version that has more keys, poly AT and breath controller input