Music Thing: Weird MIDI Controllers Special
Back from a late-winter
hibernation vacation, each week, Tom Whitwell of Music Thing
highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:
You'd be surprised how little innovation there is in music technology. Most guitarists play instruments that haven't changed for 50 years. Sampling has been around for 20 years, MIDI slightly longer than that. And the vast, vast majority of electronic musicians play piano-style keyboards whose layout hasn't changed much since 1450. Fortunately,
this hasn't stopped people trying to come up with alternatives. The fantastically simple, robust and easy-to-hack MIDI
standard means that it's easy to build controllers. It's just slightly harder to persuade anyone to use them.
Hamster-powered MIDI
sequencer
It?s a bit like a rave in reverse. The hamsters run along in their little boxes, and sensors turn their movement into music. The sequencer is three note polyphonic, and each channel is controlled by two hamsters, one for the melody,
one for the rhythm. It was built in 2003 by Cornell Engineering student and percussionist Levy Lorenzo, but he?s unfortunately not planning a commercial version?
The Music Pole
Music Pole is a particularly baffling MIDI controller. To play it, you put little Michael Jackson-style strips of conductive cloth on your thumbs, which you press against the brass contacts all over the tube. The keys are arranged in a fantastically clever way that means it?s almost impossible to play out of tune, but I can?t help wondering if thumbs are really the musical part of the body. The Music Pole was designed by Ragz Tuttle a jazz pianist from Chico,
California, who has found a manufacturer and is going into production, although there are no price details yet.
Samchillian Tip Tip Cheeepeeee
Leon Gruenbaum is a guy from New York who is in a band called ?Math Camp? and has hacked one of those ergonomic keyboards into a really badly named MIDI controller painted on like a Pollock. Rather than playing notes, each key changes the pitch of the existing note. So? press one key and it might jump up two notes in a scale. Another key might make it jump down three notes. Press loads of keys really fast, and you get very convincing widdly-widdly
guitar solos. Leon has a patent, and you can download free software from his site to turn any keyboard into a Samchillian.