Saturday, March 6, 2010

To take the Live control

Recently I was watching a Plastikman video where he used a MIDI controller designed (or built?) by his father, and I though: why my father never built a MIDI device to me?... surely I really liked if he had, but my father wasn't involved in electronics or technology at all.

Anyway, if you are interested in the controller of the Hawtin family you could see it in action in this YouTube video, I took a picture of it and shown here:


Making some research I was able to found a better picture of this console (some knobs changed) in Derivative website:

Hmmm suspiciously it seems built around the MIDIBOX circuitry, this makes me remind another famous control surface based on the MIDIBOX................... aha! I recall now: the Monolake's Monodeck, visiting Monolake's web there is a lot of information but I can't see it very clearly to compare with Plastikman's CTRL Live controller, but 5 seconds later I found this better pic:

There is not much information about Plastikman's console, but is possibly built with some MIDIBOX boards, at least to me it have 'that MIDIBOX look'. This two consoles seems somewhat expensive, custom-built, today there are too many controllers out there, being the Akai APC40 the most popular or the cheaper one Novation Launchpad, but what is evident that using a 'custom-built' controller could be more productive or give a fast-feedback for live gig.

The soft synths and sequencers are a great advance in music technology but without a doubt, the computers doesn't have the human interface that a musician needs.