Custom Midi

[Guest Bad Influence]

Looking to build a custom midi controller. Just something simple like a 3 x 3 or 4 x 4 box of assignable knobs. Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?

[Braintree]

I have no experience, but I know you can take apart a keyboard so you can get all of the velocity sensors and shit and just reposition them to fit the needs of whatever you're making.

[Guest Dr. Elemeno von Hat X: PhD]

google MIDI DIY

 

lots of stuff out there

 

http://zedomax.com/blog/tag/digikey/ - this guy has serious googlerank

 

http://www.audiomulch.com/midipic/ - so many links @ the bottom i get vertigo

 

and, finally:

 

http://www.ucapps.de/ - which is what i was trying to find. this page is the daddy. look around, you'll see why. edit: maybe start at the wiki

[Guest tht! tne]

nice av

[Guest Bad Influence]

Sweeeet, some of this stuff looks a little more complicated than I was first expecting it to but I might be able to get my electronics

lecturer to help me out. Definetly something I'll need to read up on before I jump in with both feet. Thanks Elemeno.

 

Though I might go for Braintree's idea and just destroy a keyboard.

[Guest iep]

No

 

buy this! http://www.doepfer.de/pe.htm

[Guest maus]

i looked into doing this myself for a while, and dissected my radium 49 in the hopes of repurposing all the controllers.

 

theoretically you should be able to wire switches or buttons in to every key, thereby giving you 49 contact switches (which could concievably be set to toggle in the software) and 8-odd sliders and 8-odd knobs. the advent of midi-learn in this modern age would give you a kickass controller for Ableton Live or traktor or whatever you'd like.

 

the only snag i ran into was the key mechanism on the m-audo keyboards. the velocity sensitivity uses a dual-contact system which is printed on the pc board, so soldering in simple on/off contacts is wildly complicated. everything sums into a DIN connector at which point my electronics intuition disappears.

 

the DIY MIDI kits out there are cool, but surprisingly limited. most i've seen offer at the most 16 controls or so, so you'd need to chain together a slightly retarded amount of them to get enough knobs n' switches to have any fun.

 

if anyone has cracked how to rewire the keyboard PCBs on the radiums, i'd love to know. it has to be possible. m-audio didn't want to give me the schematics, and i probably wouldn't know what to do with 'em anyway.

 

c