The term ended for grad school a month back, and I quickly started chewing the wallpaper waiting for September.
I wrote about 20,000 words of fiction in two weeks, made inroads on three textbooks I’m working on, sat down to write some music – and suddenly realized I wasn’t very happy with the ergonomics of my music writing setup.
When you write orchestral music using computers, often you will send expressive commands – volume swells, etc. – using “fader boxes”, simple devices that output MIDI “continuous controller” messages that you use like the faders on a mixer . But although I have several, none of them were making me happy for various reasons:
- Short throw. If one grew up with conventional mixers, a 25mm fader, or even a 60mm fader, can feel too short and coarse for good dynamic resolution.
- Unsatisfactory ergonomics: crammed onto the front panel of a piece of gear as an afterthought, forcing me to fit my hand in between buttons and knobs; sharp corners; poor quality faders that felt “loose” or “janky”. There was something unsatisfying in touching them to make music.
- Overcomplicated software.
- Displaying in arbitrary 0-127 numbers. Why? One of the prime abilities of computers is turning strings of arbitrary numbers like these into information people are comfortable reading.
- Predictable obsolescence. This is a pet peeve. As I work, on my left is a Toby Chennell Arco bass, built in Bournemouth with hundreds-of-year-old luthiery techniques. On my right is a 1974 Fender Precision bass. They both work as well as they did the day they were sold. But my desktop is covered with devices of a far shorter temporal scope that range from “up to the minute” (MacBook Pro M1 laptop) to “still new but far past the end of the manufacturer’s theoretical product life cycle” (which is 5 years in a lot of cases). I am often sitting in the middle of a flowchart of a five year arc of unthinking obsolescence. Whether this obsolescence was intentional or not, this was aesthetically repugnant to me. These devices often became “obsolete” because they relied on “drivers” that had to be kept updated to match evolving operating systems, and sometimes their manufactures simply stopped writing drivers, and perfectly functional equipment wound up going to landfill. There was absolutely no good reason for any of this MIDI gear going obsolete – the MIDI language itself dates from the 1980s, its successor (MIDI 2.0) is fully backwards compatible, and the mechanics of pushing a fader have not changed. I want something that lasts as long as possible.
- And everywhere – plastic surfaces, plastic knobs. I mean – I get it, from a manufacturing perspective plastic is seductive for its cheapness, durability and ease of implementation , but it’s 2021 and buying more “landfill bait” gnaws at me. And a more subtle but fairly profound point – if you are writing acoustic music, touching an organic surface just feels more… well, organic.
So I thought – well, why don’t I put my money where my mouth is? Why not build a MIDI fader box that makes me happy? So I started off with a rough list of specifications:
- Three 100mm faders (for my needs, three faders was a great starting place).
- Compact. As large as necessary, but no bigger.
- Class compliant (no “drivers”, just plug and play) and “bus powered” (no need to plug it in for power; it would power itself from the USB cable connecting it to the computer)
- Programmable from the face of the unit itself (eg not reliant on computer software to configure) yet extremely simple to reconfigure “on the fly”
- A small display for visual feedback
- Organic surfaces at the points where I would physically touch the unit (my first conception was “wood”, and preferably with a traditional finish like oil-rubbed or waxed rather than, say, a spray coat of polyester).
- Because the successor MIDI 2.0 spec was fully backwards compatible, if I built my device well, there was no good reason that it shouldn’t still be in operation in 40 years; wherever possible I would build it with an eye towards easy user-servicing, durability, user-replaceable components etc.
A quick analysis of my resources: I understood the bare rudiments of computer coding; I had a decent soldering setup and already knew how to solder to PCBs; I had already undertaken a couple of trivial projects with modern microprocessors like Arduino and the Arduino Teensy. And because I’m a big nerd, I knew that we are in the throes of a “maker revolution” that had completely democratized “making stuff”, and that great numbers of hobbyists were exploring exciting technologies that had only recently become available, and that the process of “making” was presumably much simpler than it would have been even five years ago – and if they could do it, there was a good chance that I could figure it out as well.
Against that there was time and learning curve: I had a month between courses, and in that time I was going to have to learn the basics of computer coding, come up with a design, figure out how to execute that using new and unfamiliar skills; source parts, put it all together and finish it. And hopefully design it in such a way that when somebody inevitably says “can you make one of these for me?” or “can you tell me how to make this?” I would have an answer for them.
Oh yeah – the name at the top, Hurricane MKI? That doesn’t exist at this point. That’s a name based on a concept that will evolve slowly through the process and suddenly strike me full-force. But more on that later.
Ready? OK. Here we go.