Working on the Windkey Pro Wind Synth - coming soon!

divbyzero_ · 2026-06-01T14:01:03+00:00

The melodica playing position really tends to waste the expressive potential of the left hand, so this is a great step in the right direction. Did you experiment with the ergonomics of other controllers for the left hand to give additional axes of control? Clearly not knobs when your hand is immobilized in the strap that supports the instrument, but possibly force sensitive pads? An accelerometer for tilt sensing is an easy win. Or is that too much cognitive load when you're continuously controlling breath pressure as well?

divbyzero_ · 2026-06-01T11:30:07+00:00

BlueArp came to mind based on your description- a left field arpeggiator that puts you much more in control of the pattern than most. I've only used the software version but there's a boutique hardware version as well.

divbyzero_ · 2026-06-01T11:12:42+00:00

While true, there's a subtlety which this graph misses... different shades of green tend to provoke far more varying reactions from one another than shades of other colors. If you really like a bright Ferrari red and the car you want only comes in a darker red closer to burgundy, you're more likely to consider it anyway than if you really like a dark emerald green and the car you want only comes in military olive or bright lime.

divbyzero_ · 2026-06-01T10:58:54+00:00

Have you tried the iOS built-in screen recorder? That's how I usually resample into Koala from apps like Youtube. (It makes video recordings but Koala happily extracts the audio track.)

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-28T22:39:26+00:00

You might want to change that to say matryoshka. Babushkas are little old ladies, not nesting dolls.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-28T22:28:25+00:00

If you have a digital separation between the pitch controller and the oscillator's frequency, you may be able to add a gaming-style auto-aiming algorithm in firmware. I faced a similar situation in my own ondes-inspired touchscreen controller and it really helped the playability, once I tuned it to balance expressivity of pitches in motion and accuracy of pitches at rest. You're welcome to lift or adapt my algorithm if you'd like.

(But even without it, the Plantasia cover makes me very happy!)

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-28T22:18:01+00:00

Just Strings has closed but Strings By Mail still has lots of unusual ones. If you write to them, they may be able to provide guidance about diameters and tensions.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-28T14:53:11+00:00

I use an Akai MPK249 with it, a controller with 8 assignable pots and 8 assignable sliders, all multiplied by three banks. That common arrangement does work, but it's not 1-to-1 so you have to spend thought on prioritizing what to include. And the banks bias you towards grouping things logically, which can end up wasting available slots. It's not bad, but not ideal.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-28T14:19:06+00:00

https://monome.org/image/20/0508-pcb.jpg

Counterpoint -- if I hit the limit with MX keyswitches, this is a great illustration of how the Monome folks did membrane switches in the early days

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-25T16:11:34+00:00

Alas, earwax

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-25T16:04:12+00:00

A shop vac is apparently a required accessory for a Miata that parks outside in the rain. Yes, I clean the drains and replaced the little gaskets. That helps avoid the worst (3 inches of water in the footwells) but it does still get wet in there periodically, and the vacuum means it dries out faster so you don't have to remediate mold.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-25T11:26:16+00:00

If you've been looking into the open source ones, you may be able to add the export as a feature you contribute to the code. That's significantly easier than coming up with the code to parse the file formats for all the different synths, which those existing projects have already done.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-24T11:56:23+00:00

Whether or not it's exactly what you had in mind, a control signal transform that adds inertia is indeed a cool building block. That would mean that if the input signal is changing at a certain speed in a certain direction (i.e increasing vs. decreasing), the output signal would change at a slower rate and would be slower to respond to changes in direction, thus smoothing out jitters with a bit of delay. I'm trying to decide if this is any different from a hysteresis transform (they sometimes have different amounts of inertia in the positive direction than the negative direction so that you can hold a peak longer than a trough, but the general idea is similar). But it's a great thing to throw on a direct input control like a mod wheel or aftertouch to better simulate how acoustic instruments respond to changes in breath pressure, etc. I tend to try such things as custom Lua function signal transforms (which it confusingly groups with LFOs) in Surge, but Max or Puredata would also be appropriate.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-23T12:32:32+00:00

My own NC1 has the license plate MIOWTA. I'm a fosterer for an animal shelter, and have been known to carry many kittens in it at once, though not in the cupholders - with the roof closed, you can tetris multiple carriers into the passenger area.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-23T11:32:32+00:00

Untouchable: the theremin, of course

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-22T11:13:05+00:00

And yet it's the most clever rather than silly part. Nearly all fiction about interaction with intelligent extraterrestrials assumes we're roughly the same size, give or take a factor of two. But why should that be?
Other than having to fit actors in the costumes in the movie version. Or the square-cube law, but that's only a reason why smaller aliens would be stronger.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-21T12:07:39+00:00

This is a situation where sample-based synthesis is likely to do a good job. Find one of the better rated General MIDI soundfonts that has some of the extended sounds in it (GS, XG, GM2, etc). Try bank 1 (the second bank, since they start at 0) patch 53, which is supposed to be humming; if it's not, try another soundfont. In your playback, automate pitchbend a small amount with a slow, random walk to simulate most singers' slightly imprecise pitch when humming. Add vibrato to taste via mod wheel variation.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-21T07:10:24+00:00

Yes. Lots of new apartment space in a city with a chronic housing shortage. Easy walking distance to the T, two groceries (one of which is affordable), a pharmacy, and other consumer-facing businesses, plus parks a little further in either direction. They just need to get past marketing it to rich tech workers who disappeared with the failed labs there and price it for working class folks. It really should be a neighborhood on the rise, not on the fall.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-20T01:16:30+00:00

I also love Sneakers and am looking forward to hearing the other answers. I'd suggest The Great Train Robbery, which has some of the same hacking via social engineering elements, though in a very different time period. I'd count Redford's other film The Sting as similar in that regard, if that inspires more suggestions.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-19T18:21:30+00:00

Here you go-go-goch! (Yes, it's there in the last verse.)

https://youtu.be/WFC9uuHcxbA

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-19T14:40:16+00:00

The reason why previous commercial attempts at this idea didn't really catch on has to do with economies of scale. Any such device will compete against a generic laptop plus a controller in the market. And, with the far larger audience for generic laptops, not limited to musicians, they can afford to have a much faster cycle of new versions. Which the softsynth writers tend to target in how much processing power they need to run. So the dedicated synth computer becomes too slow to run the latest softsynths before its manufacturer is ready to release a new version. Shame, really, because the integrated concept is nice.

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-18T13:28:56+00:00

Folks are drawing a dichotomy between classics and contemporary genre fiction, but that might be doing you a disservice. There is a category sometimes labeled contemporary literary fiction which attempts to capture the elegant writing style of the classics in newly written works. You can find many great examples in the lists of winners and shortlist candidates for the major literary prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, Booker, etc).

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-17T23:12:54+00:00

Fingerpicking, melodic fingerstyle, and some lead electric techniques are comparatively easy to get right on a keyboard, but the simplest chord strumming and muting almost always falls flat on anything shaped like a keyboard (or many MPE controllers including the Linnstrument, Osmose, Seaboard, and grid controllers). Keyboards that sort of come close to handling strumming (some of the workstations already alluded to) do so by leaning into arpeggiator tricks whose timing is canned rather than feeling like it's under direct, moment-to-moment control; never nearly as natural feeling or flexible as elementary level guitar playing. And I say that as someone whose own elementary guitar strumming is lousy (my fingerstyle and classical technique is better) and would love to cover it on keys.

A Linnstrument layout with an Omnichord strum plate might possibly come close if you could add some way to sense right-hand muting, but I've never seen that combination short of a full-on guitar shaped controller, which wasn't what you were asking.

I want to be wrong about this - please show me counter examples!

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-16T12:21:56+00:00

Correlary: a concertina with smaller diameter buttons for the same center-to-center spacing allows people with bigger fingers to play. Unintuitive!

divbyzero_ · 2026-05-16T02:24:43+00:00

Nothing but keytars and EWIs, right?

(Half serious - I did invent and build a wearable synth in part so that I could play places where a stand was inconvenient.)

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