Makeshift Omnichord with Korg nanoPAD, GlovePIE & Alesis Ion

YouTube via adzy31

"Recently discovered the amazing 80s instrument the Omnichord (and its newer cousin the Q-Chord) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENY3BX... - brilliant kind of electronic autoharp where you have individual buttons for a load of different chords... and a touch pad you can strum and it plays notes in that chord in some kind of amazing arpeggiated goodness.

This is my attempt to recreate the Omnichord interface with a Korg nanoPAD. I set up all the pads so they're just sending control data rather than note data, and via GlovePIE the control data from the x axis of the touch pad is divided up into 13 regions, each of which is assigned a note from an arpeggiated chord. the chords are chosen by the top row of pads. bottom right pad sends a note off message. Right now it's all chords in the key of C but something which can be changed - it's just a pain writing out the note data for the arpeggiated chords.

Midi data is being sent out from GlovePIE running on my PC to my Alesis Ion synthesizer, on a patch I forgot the original name of (renamed it when i tweaked it a bit) then through some reverb on my guitar amp.

All sounds very technical but the end result is pretty fun to use :)"