what is it, i hear you ask? well, it's an instrument somewhere between a stubborn Mellotron and the Principium 2.0 record installation.
that is to say: it plays back 12 loops continuously, and when you press a key the volume of the respective loop opens up. so unlike the Mellotron, there's no retriggering - you get to hear the loop where it happens to be at that point in time.
to the left are master volume, and the attack and release sliders determining fade in and out times. which is actually more Solina than Mellotron, but who's keeping score.
my basic idea for a single loop is pretty simple: to have several octaves of a single note (say C1, C2, C3, C4 etc) fade in and out and overlap with eachother, disappear and reappear, maybe with different timbres, filtering and processing.
then you have twelve of those loops, each with its own dedicated note. and if they are of different lengths, they will start to overlap in unpredictable ways after a while. so if you play a sustained chord, not only will the sound 'move', but it will also be impossible to predict which inversion of the chords you'll be playing, aka which of the notes will be the highest or lowest in the chord. since with several octaves fading in and out, that doesn't necessarily respond to the order of the keyboard anymore. which is exactly what happened in the 2.0 installation.
so right now i obviously have it running all twelve Principium 2.0 records - but it reads sets of 12 .wav files from a microSD card, so it can hold multiple soundsets. hence the 'bank' selection buttons. the display shows the number of the current set. and i'm very much in the process of recording new sounds for this baby.
back panel view: above the DC barrel jack there's a stop/reload switch for safe removal of the SDcard, so you can load new files without having to reboot or power down. next to that 2 output jacks: left/mono (summed) and right/TRS, so you can have stereo over a single Y-cable. and you can even hook up a set of speakers for standalone operation!
woops, forgot the 5 pin midi input. so it accepts midi (well, note on/offs) - although an 88 keyboard will still be reduced to a single octave. and with a push of the button you can select what midi channel it responds to (from 1 to 12, selected via keyboard).
the panel on the right opens up to access the SDcard, the Bela that runs the whole thing, and the arduino that handles display duties.
still some software upgrades to do, and i need to get me some swanky fader caps for the sliders, but for now: happy camper!!
