Minimoog (Taken with instagram)
Not your everyday workspace (Taken with Instagram at LASALLE College of the Arts)
Hanging in the studio (Taken with Instagram at LASALLE College of the Arts)
Jamming in the SynthLab (Taken with Instagram at LASALLE College of the Arts)
I was looking around for videos and came across this beautiful piece made using a monome and a Griffin Powermate. Beautiful sounds and a gorgeous setup. This is something that I am definitely crazy over. A minimalist way of making music. Now I need to get my hands on a monome like that.
The horizontal axis is pitch and a modal pitch map can be quickly generated on any base note, or you can edit the pitch map arbitrarily. The vertical axis is a modulation parameter that can be routed simultaneously to several destinations. Patch editing is very gratifying as everything is live all the time, so you don’t have to re-trigger notes to hear the effect. This also opens the door to additional real time control. It is easily hackable. There are no polyphony/voice limitations. The downside is it isn’t light on the processor. This patch consumes 20% of one core on my core i7. I’m using some hacked in support for the powermate knob to quickly make some parameter changes to broaden the range of timbres demonstrated.
Makers Of The Monome Create The Arc
I have always considered adding the Griffin Powermate to my setup since its caters well to a performance rig, big and illuminated. However, I was alway held back by the price and the limited functionality of just one knob. I was surprised when I saw a post mentioning that the makers of the monome are working on a knob centric controller called Arc. The Arc features 2 extremely high resolution knobs with push button. Illuminated rings around the knob provide visual feedback. I like the resolution of the rings as compared to current knobs which only has about 12 leds. This provides way more resolution and allows for more feedback. One intriguing feature is the rings in the picture seem to be displaying two parameters. Could it be able to use portions of the ring to show different parameters? That would be a really nice use of the higher resolution. The Arc will also come in a 4 knob variant and orders and shipping are open in February. Pricing and details are said to be coming soon. I hope that this would be in my price range and would hopefully complement my Nocturn.
Playing The Building by David Byrne
The latest addition to my gear, the Novation Nocturn. The Nocturn and Automap is working great together. Lets hope this one can put off the gear lust for awhile.
