Axoloti controller / enclosure / lopper synth

#1

Hello, I thought I’d share my little loopy synth / controller / enclosure thing I made for the Axoloti Core.
The enclosure is made out of bits of wood I found laying around and a piece of transparent black acrylic which makes for a nice display panel that sort of hides the OLED when it's turned off. I just used hand tools to build it so it’s not the tidiest but certainly works for now.

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IMG_0054.JPG4032x3024 1.82 MB

The controller has 7 pots, 6 buttons, an OLED and encoder. I drilled a hole in a piece of wood dowel for the encoder knob. The encoder and two buttons below the display are used to navigate menus and change extra parameters not connected to pots. I used a little hack saw to cut the pad board to fit around the Axoloti.

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Here's what it sounds like:

And here's what the patch looks like:

patch_screenshot.png1874x957 229 KB

Currently it's an MPE synth with a destructive looper. A combination of random feedback values and white noise can be introduced into the loop to create a sort of controlled deterioration to the audio stored in the table. There are two table reads in the looper, the first of which can be sped up or slowed down and when used as the record head results in the playback continuously rising or falling in pitch, you can hear this effect around 7:35 in the video. I'm still figuring out the patching side of things so it can do some weird things occasionally. There are some clicks and pops when one of the table reads overtakes the other when their speeds differ.

I'm using the MIDI sends in the top right of the patch to control live video recorded and manipulated in Processing. They sync the visuals to loop and deteriorate in time along with the sounds, still messing around with the Processing side of things to get it to a point that I like though.

Here’s a simplified version of the patch without all the controller / visual stuff:

deterioratelooper_2_simple.axp (42.6 KB)

For those that want to use just the looper part of the patch or use a different instrument with it just replace the "soft_pluck" object with whatever sound source you would like.

Slow lfo for audio loop disintegration?
Idea for saving SDRAM when using tables
#2

looks great, very inspiring,

a nice size, would love to see the underside of your control board and how you connected it to the axo board, as I would like to keep the wiring minimal in my own setup and have just male female connectors if possible, how did you manage it?

#3

Wow that looks super neat! Love the frippertronics / william basinski kind of vibes!

May I ask how you connected the pots? with little wires or with like solder lead bridges?

Edit: these pitch jumps in the second part are extremly lovely. Is that changing the speed to double temporarily and at the same time overdubing this?

#4

Thanks! Ya, I just used female and male headers so it sort of snaps in place and is easy to take off and put back on. The standoffs I had to attach the control board to the Axoloti were a little short so I had to take the plastic dividers off the male headers after they were soldered in place. This made it even more compact vertically than I had initially planned. Here's what all the wiring looks like underneath.

IMG_0059.JPG4032x2253 2.37 MB

#5

Thank you! They were both definitely big influences in designing the patch!

The pots (and mostly everything) are all wired up underneath the control board to male headers which then plug into a row of female headers on the Axoloti which you can see in the image I posted above just now.

Ya, that's pretty much what's going on with the pitch jumping. You could think about the patch in terms of a tape loop but instead the tape is stationary and the record head is moving around at a fixed rate while the play head is moving around at a variable rate. When the play head is twice as fast you get the sound pitched up an octave every time the play head does a lap past the record head and just keeps rising indefinitely if the feedback is at 100%.

#6

Awesome, that's what I had planned in my head, thank you ever so much for taking the time to shoot the other photo it really is helpful to physically see it, I guess this way theoretically you could expand the controls later should you feel the need....fantastic work anyway, thanks so much for sharing

#7

Not a problem at all. I've sort of been considering trying out using multiple encoders each on a single pin since I have a couple free still like in this post https://sebiik.github.io/community.axoloti.com.backup/t/my-rotary-encoder-on-a-single-input/5262 but would probably need to make a slightly larger enclosure then if I did. Good luck with making yours!

#8

Gorgeous build... I love the simplicity!

#9

Agreed. Quite inspirational actually.... I've been wondering about how best to design a box for my Axoloti and this is beautifully simple.

#10

I think this is one the best things I've seen here so far, beautiful build, minimalistic design, great patch, great music!

@11253
Thanks for the wire shot. Looks super tidy, it's great you found a way of neatly avoiding the spaghetti chaos of usual diy builds.

I wanted to get more into destructive looping too, so I wanna check out your patch for shure!

Do you release your music somewhere?

#12

Oh, well thank you for the kind words!

I've got a couple little sound things posted here https://11253.bandcamp.com/, I'll probably be posting more stuff to that page soon.
Also a couple past projects I've done can be found here http://lsehumanmemory.bandcamp.com/

#13

Impressive device, both in terms of the patch itself, the simple yet effective and tidy electronics, the enclosure and the music it produces!

#14

What he said — Very, very cool!