An alternative take on making an enclosure

[brasso]

When one Googles the subject one finds a lot of nifty and even sexy compact Axoloti enclosure examples. With all due respect for all the inventiveness though: Too me most of them look like the sort of solution you place between your QWERTY keyboard and a flower pot.

I am a bit of a megalomaniac myself. I love the idea of the Axoloti being the sort of, soft- AND hardware oriented, do it all system as first promised by those totally UN- affordable early 80ties computer music systems like the Fairlight and Synclavier (even if it isn't :-)).

Call me a diry knobbing fetishist but I find ergonomics very important anyway. When I am actually making music or programming sound I do not want to get bogged down by any desktop minimalism. So there is actually (some) sense behind my madness.

Here are my first results of going down the hardware road. This “high tech workstation” is actually based on an old school desk which I have been using as a keyboard stand for donkey years anyway. I have now reassembled it in a different manner, added a pull out drawer and repainted it in my Starship One ”house style”.

The advantages of such a layout are obvious enough. The whole thing now works as a general workstation anyway, keeping the living room table free as a bonus. And yes, the drawer is a bit big for one single Axoloti but I am still hoping for a future software update that drives a whole array of parallel Axoloti's with multichannel poly expression from one single main Live programming screen (please @Johannes!).

The next (hardware) step will be to turn the sloping front of the drawer between the grips (aren't they SO Arty and practical at the same time?) into a generic hardware control surface.

Any (productive) comments / opinions?

[Makrotulpa]

Yeah my current setup looks like this...

Synths are on a drafting table at a 30° angle.
Two Ikea laptop risers are resting on wooden blocks to bring them level to the V-Synth.
This also helps hide all the cables and the axoloti core.

@brasso how do you use the Wacom tablet in this setup. Can you draw partials like a CMI?

[brasso]

Nice setup. The only reason I do not own a V-synth is because I never found a cheap one. If I would have I'd probbaly have drowned myself in it. It is a bit of a hardware precurser of my Holy Grail concept (which see).

Why the tablet? Mostly becuase I simply do not like using a mouse (Me real lion, not housecat!). I actually started using them for 3D CAD drawing but never looked back since then anyway. They also say that they are ergonomically better suited to our body. Nobody has ever complained about getting a tennis or mouse arm or whatever while using a pen.

It's an aquired taste though.

Drawing waveforms and stuff would of course also be cool and should be more or less possible with some of the existing Axoloti "graphic eq"-type objects but I'd rather go for something like this preliminary drawing for an "ideal" Axoloti control surface suggests:

See if you can figure out the idea behind it. The L1 to L8 objects are meant to be faders by the way. Theoretically your controller box could also be used for such a task.

[Makrotulpa]

V-Synth was cheap enough - $1k aud which is currently around $760 usd.
It's taken me a year or so to really work out how "I" use it.
FWIW I think an XT would likely be more sensible but i've never seen one cheap enough.

With regard to your control surface... do the groups switch between different loopable waveforms and can the loop be adjusted?

Not sure what the PARAMs do - depth of group modulation?

BTW your setup looks like a new wonder of the world!

[Makrotulpa]

Right - loopable envelopes? That makes sense. And presumably the group switch jumps between 4 different ones?
This could be do-able with the K-Mix except I've not been able to get the Axoloti to see it via USB, only DIN.
With USB I've had bidirectional control with Usine which would enable the LEDs to show 8 points on a waveform.
So you would need the switch to change them on the AXO and then send to the K-Mix which would then display it.
Currently my AXO is sending 4 channels to the Nord Modular, receiving USB MIDI from the OP-1 with the K-Mix sending DIN and acting as a Mixer for all parts.
Your dream setup might be doable with an iPad and Lemur software.

[brasso]

The group switches let you choose between diferent sections in your instrument. So basically they are page switches in a menu. In a normal analog synth instrument they would for instance be named OSC. (oscillator), FILT. (Filter), VCA, and MOD. (modulation). You could then use the controls to set up a single shot multistage envelope or an equally complex loop EG/LFO, turning it into a single universal ENV/LFO tool which would make the conventional versions redundant.

It's not an entirely new concept at all but it would be a very practical general solution with instant visual feedback. With simple shapes one could basically draw them.

Here's one of my inspirations:

and

Here such a solution is even used to draw the oscillator waveforms. My interpretation has less faders but because many generic fader controllers tend to have 8 faders and the Axoloti board only has 16 analog hardware inputs overall anyway. With the added total time, release time and smoothing / non-smoothing switch options it will however still be rather nifty alternative.

[brasso]

PS. Since I still work with low speed DIN MIDI I'd rather use that for note and note related info only and the Axoloti's hardware inputs for programming.

[thetechnobear]

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