I’ve been using Cantabile live for a couple of years, the power of the routing still astounds me. I use it mainly to trigger VST changes for guitar FX, as well as synth patch changes.
The MIDI signals come from a custom-made foot controller (with 13 buttons), and up until recently changing what the buttons do has meant editing C++ code and re-flashing the firmware. Tedious. So I hopped on the AI bandwagon and have created an Open Source project to not only allow easy editing of the button actions, but even design your own hardware as well.
Although it’s only tangentially related to Cantabile, without Brad’s awesome software this idea would never have worked and grown legs! I’d be interested to hear what you all think of it. Thanks
Brilliant. I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. It’s a bit over my head, but just to know this is doable is a great relief. I use a modified Artiphon Instrument 1 as a core part of my act. First the instrument, and now the company that made it, have been discontinued. Luckily I have 3 of them. But I’ve never been entirely satisfied with it; though it’s still the closest thing I can find to what I need (which is nothing fancy, basically just a one-handed bass guitar). Your project means that I can design the most comfortable, playable hardware from scratch, without having to retrofit something lesser to existing hardware. Thank you so much. (And thanks again, as always, to Brad, for making this all possible to begin with.) What country are you based in?
Hi @GJS, thank you. I’m based in the UK. Where are you?
I’d not thought that this project could be used to make an actual instrument (i.e. a wide range of chromatic playable notes) but there’s no reason it couldn’t. However, as the trigger buttons are wired directly into the Teensy which has a limited number of pins, the number of notes is limited.
I bet there’s something you could do with shift registers (or some other component) that will “extend” the number of pins to give you many more. But I’m not knowledgeable enough at electronics to give any further help!
I’m very interested in seeing what people do with the project, please do let me know what you do with it.
Ah UK, of course. Yorkshiretwist is a pretty obvious clue. I’m in Australia, like our good friend Brad.
According to the oracle, the Teensy 4.1 has 55 pins; more than enough for my needs. My current setup has 6 “strings” and 4 “frets” - a total of 24 buttons. That covers 2 octaves, which in most applications, is quite sufficient for a bass instrument (especially as midi allows one to shift the range of notes). It would be handy to add another “fret”, so that the highest note replicates the lowest note (much like on a 25-key keyboard), but that only takes us to 30 buttons. So just over half a Teensy is required.
