Chris Hurley
Power User
For however many years now, I've been wanting to build a MIDI controller with knobs. There is something pleasant about turning a knob.
I had a RAC12 for a little while and liked it pretty well but wanted to build my own and have finally gotten around to doing so- the first generation anyway.
The enclosure is about the size of an Atomic Amplifirebox and has 4 knobs. I had some difficulty deciding what to do with the 4 knobs, so I made it into 4 banks of 3 knobs with the first knob choosing the bank. There are also two switches, a jack for an expression pedal and a jack for two more switches.
The knobs are on real pots so they jump to position when you change them- I think I prefer this to rotary encoders so far, though the available switch on the rotary encoders would be nice. You can't see what the knobs are set to but I don't really have a problem with that. I just grab it and turn it.
Initially I had these as continuous controllers but I got the sysex commands working to use them to control Axe-FX II amp block parameters directly. When I get around to building a larger controller with more than 12 knobs, or a combination of things with more than 12 knobs, this will be important since you can only have 12 MIDI controllers on the Axe-FX II.
I bought a bigger enclosure and some smaller pots, so I think I can build another one of these with a lot more pots to control different things, and I'm still thinking about a 1U rack controller or maybe some integration between them.
One thing that I've considered is making the foot controller chainable so that you could have something that behaved like a stomp box and then however many you want.
Whenever I've been away from stompboxes for a while, when I hook one up there is just something pleasant about the experience. The loss of presets is certainly a thing but just being able to turn the knob is so refreshing.
I need to take a couple of pictures to share- I ended up using some of the RGB LED's. The colors are programmed to sort of "percolate" over time which looks kind of neat and makes it obvious that I haven't locked up the microcontroller!
Colored LEDs give you a lot of options.
Anybody working on any MIDI controller projects?
I had a RAC12 for a little while and liked it pretty well but wanted to build my own and have finally gotten around to doing so- the first generation anyway.
The enclosure is about the size of an Atomic Amplifirebox and has 4 knobs. I had some difficulty deciding what to do with the 4 knobs, so I made it into 4 banks of 3 knobs with the first knob choosing the bank. There are also two switches, a jack for an expression pedal and a jack for two more switches.
The knobs are on real pots so they jump to position when you change them- I think I prefer this to rotary encoders so far, though the available switch on the rotary encoders would be nice. You can't see what the knobs are set to but I don't really have a problem with that. I just grab it and turn it.
Initially I had these as continuous controllers but I got the sysex commands working to use them to control Axe-FX II amp block parameters directly. When I get around to building a larger controller with more than 12 knobs, or a combination of things with more than 12 knobs, this will be important since you can only have 12 MIDI controllers on the Axe-FX II.
I bought a bigger enclosure and some smaller pots, so I think I can build another one of these with a lot more pots to control different things, and I'm still thinking about a 1U rack controller or maybe some integration between them.
One thing that I've considered is making the foot controller chainable so that you could have something that behaved like a stomp box and then however many you want.
Whenever I've been away from stompboxes for a while, when I hook one up there is just something pleasant about the experience. The loss of presets is certainly a thing but just being able to turn the knob is so refreshing.
I need to take a couple of pictures to share- I ended up using some of the RGB LED's. The colors are programmed to sort of "percolate" over time which looks kind of neat and makes it obvious that I haven't locked up the microcontroller!
Colored LEDs give you a lot of options.Anybody working on any MIDI controller projects?