Rack Mount Edition - touch surface

[kurt]

Hi,

I have just bought the RME of the voyager. It has indeed a very sexy sound.

Now i want a touch surface for my RME like on the VPE. Will the korg kaospad2 work with it? Or do i need something else ?

greetings,

Kurt

[suthnear]

kurt,

there is one small problem facing you in attempting to replicate the functionality of the voyager's touchpad. Every midi touch pad I've encountered only generates 7 bit midi continuous controllers (i.e. they have a range of 0-127). This is obviously a very coarse resolution and with most synths that use 7 bit controllers to control their parameters, you can hear audible stepping between positions (a phenomenon known as zipper noise). All the voyager's controls are mapped to 14 bit controllers (i.e. they have a range of 0-16383). So a pad that only sends 7 bit controllers is simply not going to work for the voyager. I don't know anything about the kaoss but you'd want to check whether it can send user configurable 14 bit controllers. The user configurable part is terribly important: the voyager's allocations are fixed and you would need to set the pad to whatever controllers you want the pad to control.

You could also try to find an analogue touchpad, one that generates control voltages and then send these to the RME via a vx352. I don't know if anyone makes an analogue touchpad, though.

hth,

[MC]

Buchla makes a touchpad but they're a bit more than most people would pay.

Just for clarification - the Voyager touchpad MIDI CC are not fixed, you can set them to anything else.

[pelican1]

why don't they make a moogerfooger wireless touch controller?

[kurt]

@MC: i think the Buchla option is to expensive.

@suthnear: thanks for the very interesting info.

So i have 2 options, buy an korg kaos pad including "zipper noise" or wait that Moog release the touchpad as a standalone product.

[suthnear]

So i have 2 options, buy an korg kaos pad including "zipper noise" or wait that Moog release the touchpad as a standalone product.

It's not quite that simple. I haven't actually tried controlling my voyager with a 7 bit CC, but each parameter of the voyager is controlled by two of them, removing one might not have the result expected. The 14 bit controller is made up of two bytes (rather than the one for the 7 bit controller) and I don't know offhand how removing one of them affects the parameter to which it is assigned. For instance, rather than being a lower resolution version of the controller (which would lead to the small jumps suggested by zipper noise) it may instead contain discontinuities (which would lead to large jumps). I'll test this tonight and post my findings.

As another option, rather than touchpad you could use an analogue joystick, like this one from wiard (http://www.wiard.com/):

http://www.musicsynthesizer.com/Joystick/1209.htm

It's $150 and you can power it off a battery. Since he provides the schematic, you could even build your own.

[voltergeist]

I agree completely. I actually suggested it to some of the Moog guys at the NAMM show, but they were not too receptive. Their response was basically that there were other products on the market already. I had also suggested a Performer Edition -style housing that the RME could be bolted into that would have mod wheels and the touchpad. Kinda like the way the Korg Radius is a rack module that bolts into a keyboard chassis. They didn't think there would be enough of a market. They're probably right, but I would sure love the option of having my Voyager either rackmounted or in a performance keyboard package.

And PLEASE build a polyphonic Voyager! What would be really badass is if the polyphony were modular, so you could initially buy one with 3 or 4 notes of polyphony, and add modules for more polyphony as you can afford them.

[Amos]

The Voyager straddles the line between 7-bit and 14-bit-ness by using 2 standard (7-bit) Controller numbers for each 14-bit parameter. You certainly can control any parameter using only a single 7-bit CC; to do this, use the one designated as "MSB" (Most Significant Byte) in the Voyager manual. The resulting "zipper noise" is what happens when it jumps from big step to big step (MSB) without going through all the little steps (LSB) in between... if you already understand the concept you will know what I mean... otherwise that was probably not such a good explanation, sorry.

Big Briar once made a stand-alone CV touch pad that output all the same CVs as the Voyager touch surface. Perhaps it could be brought back into production... maybe under the unbelievably crass name of "the FingerFooger?"
Or maybe not. But nonetheless, I have seen such a device in real life and I agree that it would be a good thing if it were in production. The mathematics of such a thing, what it would cost to bring to market versus how many would want one, might be prohibitive.

Note that the VX-352 now exists... this provides CV input jacks for the touch surface X,Y,A, and Gate. Take note: This means, since you can PROGRAM the destination of all these things in the Edit menu, that the RME + VX-352 has three programmable, freely-assignable continuous CV inputs that you can route to anything you might normally route the touch pad to control. The only catch is that the GATE CV input has to be on for the others to work - but that's because that's how it works on the keyboard Voyager to begin with... you can't very well controll the X,Y parameters without touching the touch surface, can you? Anyway, this is insanely cool and may help to answer your question.

Cheers,

Amos

[godzilla]

could you post a picture of the big briar touch pad, or at least a link or two?

you guys should put it on the moog archive, in fact you should have a whole big briar section with all the big briar theremins that are no longer in production and any other things like that.

i think it would be cool if they released another touch pad, but they'd have to keep it under $200