Experiments with light-controlled synth + guitar effects


#1

HI all,

This is just a little demo of something that I set up for a particular song (not to try to put together a whole light-based system or anything that ambitious). I thought it might interest some people here so it was perhaps worth posting. The other reason for posting this is as a preliminary introduction to the "Betweener" which is a project that I have been working on with collaborators here in Chicago for about a year now. Betweener is a Teensy-based MIDI/CV and CV/MIDI controller retaining flexibility to do all the other stuff Teensy can do. We are hoping to have the project (hardware and a simple arduino library) stable enough to share publicly to the DIY community in a few months, and I suspect it would be of interest to Axoloti folks, so I will definitely post here about it if that comes to pass.

For me, as a guitar-player, the thing that Betweener adds is an interesting layer of interaction to couple Axoloti-based guitar effects to other systems. Although I'm not really much of a synth person, I picked up a Moog mother 32 a couple of months back and I have been using the Betweener to do a lot of fun programmable modulation of it.

In this demo (extremely crude - just showing the ideas here, very quickly), I've got Betweener taking input from an RGB color/light sensor and converting it simultaneously to a set of CV signals to modulate my Moog and a MIDI signal to control a synchronized tremolo layered over a couple of Axoloti guitar effects. I am really liking the way it sounds to have the guitar and synthesizer synchronized as it is pretty confusing to the ear (although you really can't tell that from the crude video).

Update: here's the actual song that I made out of this thing: