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Sharing this here for the community, and I've sent the same to TEControl — a report from using the BBC2 hard in a live band, driving a rack of SWAM Solo physical-modeling instruments (Audio Modeling) hands-free: breath, bite, head-nod and head-tilt shaping expression, growl, pitch and section-falls while my hands stay on the keys. It's the best expressive controller I've played (more at the end), and I wanted to show exactly how I use it, plus a few config-tool additions that look small but would unlock a lot for everyone.What I love most: the calibration depth. The per-sensor curves + input/output ranges aren't just fine-tuning — for live playing they're about endurance and comfort:
- Breath — I cap the breath max well below my full lung pressure, so I reach the full MIDI range without blowing hard. Over an hour set that's the difference between playing musically and hyperventilating.
- Bite — I leave the max high when biting on the cover (teeth), or cap it lower when I drive it with lip pressure (the sensor reads both) — matching the ceiling to my embouchure.
- Nod / Tilt — you can't tilt or nod your head to full extension over and over, so mapping a comfortable partial range to full MIDI is essential. Calibrate + the Monitor make that easy.
How I actually use it with SWAM — and where I hit the walls:
Tilt = two different articulations, one on each side. I split the tilt axis so tilting right adds vibrato (CC1) and tilting left triggers a section-fall (a different CC). One head movement, two idiomatic horn gestures, chosen by direction. The config tool can't do this today — a sensor sends one message across its whole range, so the two halves can't address two controllers. I do the split in Bome.
Nod = pitch bend, but with a stability zone — because the neck has no spring. A pitch-bend wheel has a spring that snaps it back to exact zero when you release it. Your neck doesn't — when you bring your head back to "neutral," it never lands on precisely the same value twice. Map head position straight to pitch and the note sits slightly sharp or flat at rest and drifts as you play. The fix is a flat stability zone in the middle: any head position near center outputs exactly zero, so "roughly neutral" reliably means "no bend."
The concrete numbers I settled on (to give a sense of the plateau): the sensor runs 0–127, head-centered ≈ 64. I use a dead-zone of ±10 around center — so 54–74 outputs nothing (about the middle 15%), and the remaining ~54 units on each side rescale to the full target range (±8191 for pitch bend, 0–127 for a CC). Ten either side was the sweet spot: small enough to stay responsive, big enough that normal head-sway never bleeds into the note.
The requests — each a modest lift, because the hard part is already done:
1. Split one axis into TWO targets (up vs down / left vs right). My #1 — exactly the tilt case above: the two halves of a bipolar sensor addressing two different controllers.
2. A center dead-zone / stability zone for nod/tilt. A flat band around the calibrated center that emits nothing — one more slider next to Input Min/Max. This is what makes head-controlled pitch usable at all (the no-spring problem).
3. Auto-symmetric calibration. Let me define one reference on a bipolar axis and mirror it to the other side automatically — the head is symmetric around center, so most players would set one side and be done. You already compute the center on Calibrate; this is essentially a "symmetric" checkbox.
4. Show each setting's numeric value and let me type it. The config is all sliders; verifying that left and right are set symmetrically, or dialing an exact dead-zone width, is fiddly by drag. A numeric readout + editable text field next to each control would let me set exact values, copy them side-to-side, and confirm symmetry at a glance. Small addition, real precision win.
The honest part — why this matters beyond me: I can do #1 and #2 today only because I happen to own Bome MIDI Translator and can write rules. Here are the actual rules I run live:
Nod -> Pitch Bend, with a ±10 center stability zone:
Code: Select all (#)
mf=10 // dead-zone half-width
sg=1
ma=ma-64 // center the nod value on 0
if ma<0 then sg=-1 // remember direction
ma=ma*sg // absolute value
ma=ma-mf // subtract the dead-zone
if ma<0 then ma=0
if ma==0 then exit rules // inside the zone -> no bend at all
mf=64-mf // remaining usable span (54)
ma=ma*sg // restore direction
ma=ma*8191
ma=ma/mf // rescale to full pitch-bend rangeCode: Select all (#)
mf=10
sg=1
ma=ma-64
if ma<0 then sg=-1
ma=ma*sg
ma=ma-mf
if ma<0 then ma=0
if ma==0 then exit rules // dead-zone -> nothing
if sg==1 then mf=63-mf // right-half span
if sg==-1 then mf=64-mf // left-half span
ma=ma*127
ma=ma/mf // rescale to 0-127
mc=1 // tilt right -> CC1 (vibrato)
if sg==1 then exit rules, execute
mc=4 // tilt left -> CC4 (section fall)Last thing, and I mean it: after trying a lot of expressive control surfaces — wheels, ribbons, faders, expression pedals, MPE — the playing feel of the BBC2 is by far the best I've had. Breath + head + jaw driving a physically-modeled horn is the closest I've come to actually playing the instrument, and honestly it's jubilant — the kind of pure playing pleasure that keeps you going. That's exactly why I'm pushing for these: I want to take it even further.
(For context, I wrote up the SWAM-side integration separately in the Instruments forum: "Open-source toolkit: SWAM default MIDI maps + host parameter IDs".)
Thanks for a genuinely great product,
Ben