Appendage Touch Ribbon Controller First Video

YouTube via ScottStites

"A preview of the Appendage Touch Ribbon Controller project. Sorry for the lousy audio (working on that)."

Some notes directly from Scott:
"It's a video of my latest project, the Appendage Touch Ribbon Controller. It's just me futzing around on it, more or less. The audio is lousy (my camera has no line input, so it's just crappy mic audio). The Appendage is set up to control a VCO and filter with its mixed output, the EG is controlled by the gate and trigger outputs, and filter cutoff is controlled both by EG and slide output. VCA is controlled by the EG output. It's a single Sawtooth VCO with harmonics added by my Schmitz Late MS-20 filter, then run through my Schmitz 2040 Transistor Clone filter. The Appendage generates four different control voltages, plus it can mix those voltages in different ratios on an additional mixed output. The four voltages are: Initial Note, Slide, Bend, and "TFS", which is a voltage that is proportional to the difference between two points of pressure. In this video, just the initial and TFS control pitch at the beginning. I then add external modulation for a while, take the external modulation out, add a slight bit of bend to produce the standard dying whale noises, then add more bend to give it more vibrato and positional slide. Towards the end, I turn up a feature called "AutoGlide" which basically glides the bend and slide voltages if they're sustained and "hammered on", but does not lag the initial note. It's sort of like the legato type portamento found on various synth keyboards.

There are several other functions not covered in this video."

Update via Scott (I asked him about size):
"The circuit will handle any size of SoftPot (I've tried 500mm, 200mm and...oh dang, smaller than 200 - can't remember if it's 100 or 50mm now). It's almost comical to watch the really small ribbon, because you can drive your modular 10 Octaves (sub to ultrasonic) just by moving your finger a couple of inches or so.

Originally I was hoping there would be a front panel switch that would allow one to switch different sizes out, but that didn't work out - the circuit is calibrated to whatever size of SoftPot ribbon that is used. It'll also operate at +/-15V and +/-12V (in the video it's operating at +/-12V because that was my most current test - I usually use +/-15V rails myself).

This is the full blown Appendage, which has the external inputs for S&H using the ribbon, external gating (great for arpeggios and making it sound like your fingers move at light speed), external keyboard function (which allows a sort of duophony plus the legato portamento I mentioned), and triggering modes (re-trigger and "hyper trigger", which creates triggers on applying pressure and removing pressure - another method to get really fast runs in). It's also switchable between voltage and current mode. The difference between voltage and current mode is how the ribbon reacts to more than one pressure point. It puts out voltages in current mode, BTW, it's just that the ribbon is looked at by the circuit as sort of an infinite resolution constant current keyboard, with left hand priority. In this case, TFS is independent of slide and bend, so the left hand can slide, etc., while the right hand can control things like filter cutoff without affecting any pitch outputs. In current mode, it acts a lot like the late, great John Simonton's description of his PAiA ribbon controller.

It's a fairly large circuit, so we (by "we" I mean Bill Manganaro, State Machine on electro-music - he's laying out the PCB) are planning a slimmer version that will have the basics - Slide, Bend and Initial, plus gate and trigger output and external mod in only (no TFS output). That model would still be a nice pitch controller, but would also be sized for using as an adjunct controller to other controllers (like keyboards)."