The Nibbletronic
CC Attribution 4.0 International:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
ctrapp
The NibbleTronic is a MIDI wind controller that features a novel user interface resulting in a unique tonal range. The standard configuration allows to precisely play a bit more than four full octaves including semitones with only one hand.
 Alright, we're going to talk here about the Nibble Tronic. I have here this brave guy, C-Trap, called since today. He's an electronic engineer and he's really into the fascinating thing of using media controllers and playing with it. He makes musical instruments and he's going to show you how to get there. Unfortunately, the musician is ill today, so I don't know, maybe we have to call someone from the audience to help him out, to play some music afterwards. But this guy will show it all. You're right. Thank you. Let's light the fuse then. Okay, first, hello, I'm a bit nervous, but happy to be here. I want to ask you to ask you questions as they arise so you can keep track of what is going on. And, yeah, then this is what it will be about. I will tell you what I did with this device. Then I will tell you what others did before me. And then we want to discuss if you should do the same. As it is traditional, I start with the finished product, what we have here is the current state of the nebutronic. I should get rid of the table. We see the mouthpiece at the left. Then there's a pressure sensor. It is connected with a split PVC hose. There are four micro switches right next to the microcontroller board you see there. And then we have a joystick and two more sliders. On the other side, there is another slider and a media jack. I completely lost track of shit. This is the previous version and I will use it to illustrate the working principle. As you can see, it had quite a lot more buttons. It could only play around 11 nodes. One for each button and another one for no button pressed. The working principle is that you have this mouthpiece, the split hose which allows you to blow through so it feels like a traditional instrument. You put your fingers on the button and play it like a flute. The pressure sensor either triggers a note if none has been played before or controls the volume of the synthesizer. So you can have a volume envelope for every note like a wind instrument does. The buttons define which note is played or trigger another note when you change your finger placement. One note aren't that many so I decided to use fewer buttons to play more notes. And the five of the left hand then were used to encode five bits. So using these five buttons you can then count a binary up to 31. This worked. You have great tone range, you can play four full octaves with that if you omit the same tones. But it is a bit hard to memorize 32 distinct finger placement. Nobody wants to do that. So I came up with a more ergonomic control scheme. Where's the next button here? It's good with that. Using only five buttons you can ditch one more because that one was for the thumb and was kind of hard to play. It became a thumb rest. I then added two buttons from the right hand and that way was able to encode 60 notes and with the right hand up to four octaves which was actually it became playable. You only had to remember 12 finger placements and you could, you started to play semi-tone so you had the full tone range of four octaves which is quite something. Remembering finger settings is better than 32 but not yet ideal and having 16 numbers available for just 12 notes that I needed. Then the final refinement I decided to assign the full notes to the even numbers and the semi-tones to the uneven ones. That way you only have seven finger placements left and that actually was manageable and has been played last year on this conference. I never learned to do this. This is the resulting control scheme and this is implemented in the current version. You see you play with actually only three fingers and have the pinky left as modifier for semi-tones. This works. It still has a lot of unused buttons and has the slight problem that it is pain in the ass to manufacture. All the brass rods and threadings and putting it on, it takes ages. It was kind of unergonomic. There were tons of cables. So time for the next iteration and this is that, that what came from that. On the other side we have the four buttons for the notes and joystick for pitch bend and modulation as somehow they showed up on synthesizers and never went away. I thought I'd go with that. Two sliders for whatever. You can assign some continuous controller to that and adjust your sound and whatever you do with the MIDI controller. On the lower side we have now a slider. The slider next to the pressure sensor is used to encode the octaves and the whole range is mapped to just four. If you want more octaves you can program them in. You can actually solve this in software which is nice but it becomes hard to find. Your tape that way after some time. And we have a battery as a power supply so few cables now. I'm missing the next button. Problem is nothing I've ever done is actually new as I found out. And there's tons of prior art out there. In the comment section of the Godophone blog you find lots of people asking questions for their own builds. So there are really, really a lot of EWIs out there. As I said, Instructables. This is the wireless Godophone. Some build I found. This one is interesting. It is a device by Nias Dina who started to design these things in the 60s and built the first ones in the 70s. And then actually designed the one big commercially available product from archive. This is a Nias Dina design. So there's actually one person doing all this thing out there. There are a lot of builds. These things are available and I have never witnessed one being used in some kind of performance. So they exist and nobody uses them. Which was kind of a mystery to me. So there are the reasons why these things exist. There are a lot of practical reasons. There are artistic reasons you can control. Not just synthesizers, you can control your light show. And this might make sense in some settings. But the really big advantage of EWIs is that by traditional instruments have an interface that is mostly defined by the underlying physics. With an electronic device you can do what you want. You have no such constraints and you can build an instrument for somebody who has maybe a non-standard number of fingers or hands. Another idea would be to ditch the breath control completely, replace it with a foot pedal and you can build a wind instrument that somebody with weakened lung or some other problems can actually play. So there is the main reason to design these things. To build instruments that otherwise, for people that otherwise couldn't, can play an instrument. As an example, I have the sketch of an EWI for a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a very long neck, reinforced steel mouthpiece, reinforced claw pads and another band control input that allows the T-Rex with its poor fine motor skills to actually play this thing. Another good reason to build those is to understand what's there. What we have here is the device that is built by Archi and in the circle there's a set of metal rollers. And they are opposite of the left-hand finger pads. They react to touch. They can be moved but they don't detect movement. And I've seen this and I didn't understand why somebody would build such an interface. And then I built this. We have a question. Oh, thank you. So if you're really interested, I own this device and I know how to play it. And if you know how to play a saxophone, it's completely obvious why you want to build it that way. I understood it later because this is the only wind instrument that I actually own and I can't play it. Which is a shame, I'm planning to learn it since two years or so. Excuse me, are there saxophone players here in the room? Maybe they can help you with that. I actually figured it out because this setup with the octave selection opposite of the left-hand fingers doesn't work so well. You're pushing on the slider and at the same time pushing against your fingers so you can play notes that require you to release all your fingers. You're just pushing the instrument out of your mouth and that may be a chromatic element but it doesn't really work. This could be meditated in several ways with an extrap like many traditional instruments. But in the end I found out that these rollers at the archive are actually used for a tape selection. So no real new idea there. And because they react to touch, you don't really have to push against your fingers. You can move your left-hand fingers completely independent from your thumb and because these rollers give you really good feedback where your thumb is much better than the mechanical slider. So, yeah, by building my own device I kind of imitated accidentally the big one by archive and got to understand why they did what they did, how they came to these conclusions and I got a really nice understanding about electronic wind instruments. So this is another good reason why you might want to build such a device. Yeah, come on. Yeah, if you thought you would see something revolutionary here, they exist since the 60s. They make sense. If you have a T-Rex in your life who wants to play wind instrument, now you can build one for him. And you probably should if you want to understand these devices. They pose some interesting software problems. You don't want to spam your synthesizer, but you want to have continuous breath control the whole time and you have to balance that out. The sensor is not quite straightforward and there are a lot of interesting problems to solve them. If you don't want to start from scratch, here are the links and the God of Phone page is great. There are several builds, several different control schemes and there is a lot of theory in there, lots of source code and lots of solutions. At Patchman there is the historical reference. There are the devices of Nias Diener and some other exotic builds. Hopkins electronic aero phone is actually wireless, which might be interesting to build if you enter that. And of course we have the Nibbletronic which you have seen here and several pictures. So thank you very much. I have the, I'm under the impression that I've been quite fast this time. I'm kind of as relieved as you and are there any questions? Fantastic. Thank you very much. See you, Trap. I think we all appreciate it that you come over to speak about a Nibble instrument. Actually I can help you as well to point you to some saxophone players who play this Akai kind of devices. Are there people here among the audience who play this instrument? Is there a possibility maybe to show as well the instruments because you have it here in your box? I actually brought it with me. And the full bill of materials is on the page and are some bought, which you can't order less than six. So I don't want to find an orchestra. Not yet, but there are enough people here to make that kind of band. Is this functional? Can we test it without having damages? Not right now. The firmware is kind of bugged currently. I came here to finish the development and to work on the next iteration because as I said, this solution for octave selection is less than ideal. Probably there are some people who can help you with that. Are there? I thought that maybe some people around here might know something about building hardware. I'm not sure, but I don't see any hands yet. No one? There. Okay. We found one. Second. Very nice. Okay, there are questions I presume. Here from the internet. Yes, the question is why did you choose a non-canonical setup for the finger buttons? A non what? Excuse me, can you repeat that please? Why have you chosen a non-canonical setup for the finger buttons? I hated playing the recorder at school and I wanted to go as far away as possible from that. I love that. We know that feeling I presume. Is there another question somewhere here? Maybe. Oh yeah, one second. Please take the microphone, sir. Playing the buttons. Yeah. What exactly does the breath do? What does the pressure sensor do? Is it for volume? It controls the channel volume. I think it's CC7 or something like that of the whole synthesizer. So you can define your volume envelope for each note. Okay, thank you. Right. Is there someone else? Question? There are four mics here. Someone on the internet. Yes, there, please, sir. Take the mic. So if you want to see somebody who's really good at it playing the acaiivi, you go to YouTube and search for original arrays by Michael Brecker and then you see a super original arrays played by Michael Brecker and his band. Thank you. No one else here with a suggestion. Is there a band that can be now assembled here in the back? No. Thank you very much. Once again, thank you C-Trap for this fantastic presentation. Thank you.
 Alright, we're going to talk here about the Nibble Tronic.  I have here this brave guy, C-Trap, called since today.  He's an electronic engineer and he's really into the fascinating thing of using media controllers  and playing with it.  He makes musical instruments and he's going to show you how to get there.  Unfortunately, the musician is ill today, so I don't know, maybe we have to call someone  from the audience to help him out, to play some music afterwards.  But this guy will show it all.  You're right.  Thank you.  Let's light the fuse then.  Okay, first, hello, I'm a bit nervous, but happy to be here.  I want to ask you to ask you questions as they arise so you can keep track of what is going  on.  And, yeah, then this is what it will be about.  I will tell you what I did with this device.  Then I will tell you what others did before me.  And then we want to discuss if you should do the same.  As it is traditional, I start with the finished product, what we have here is the current  state of the nebutronic.  I should get rid of the table.  We see the mouthpiece at the left.  Then there's a pressure sensor.  It is connected with a split PVC hose.  There are four micro switches right next to the microcontroller board you see there.  And then we have a joystick and two more sliders.  On the other side, there is another slider and a media jack.  I completely lost track of shit.  This is the previous version and I will use it to illustrate the working principle.  As you can see, it had quite a lot more buttons.  It could only play around 11 nodes.  One for each button and another one for no button pressed.  The working principle is that you have this mouthpiece, the split hose which allows you  to blow through so it feels like a traditional instrument.  You put your fingers on the button and play it like a flute.  The pressure sensor either triggers a note if none has been played before or controls  the volume of the synthesizer.  So you can have a volume envelope for every note like a wind instrument does.  The buttons define which note is played or trigger another note when you change your  finger placement.  One note aren't that many so I decided to use fewer buttons to play more notes.  And the five of the left hand then were used to encode five bits.  So using these five buttons you can then count a binary up to 31.  This worked.  You have great tone range, you can play four full octaves with that if you omit the same  tones.  But it is a bit hard to memorize 32 distinct finger placement.  Nobody wants to do that.  So I came up with a more ergonomic control scheme.  Where's the next button here?  It's good with that.  Using only five buttons you can ditch one more because that one was for the thumb and  was kind of hard to play.  It became a thumb rest.  I then added two buttons from the right hand and that way was able to encode 60 notes and  with the right hand up to four octaves which was actually it became playable.  You only had to remember 12 finger placements and you could, you started to play semi-tone  so you had the full tone range of four octaves which is quite something.  Remembering finger settings is better than 32 but not yet ideal and having 16 numbers  available for just 12 notes that I needed.  Then the final refinement I decided to assign the full notes to the even numbers and the  semi-tones to the uneven ones.  That way you only have seven finger placements left and that actually was manageable and  has been played last year on this conference.  I never learned to do this.  This is the resulting control scheme and this is implemented in the current version.  You see you play with actually only three fingers and have the pinky left as modifier  for semi-tones.  This works.  It still has a lot of unused buttons and has the slight problem that it is pain in the  ass to manufacture.  All the brass rods and threadings and putting it on, it takes ages.  It was kind of unergonomic.  There were tons of cables.  So time for the next iteration and this is that, that what came from that.  On the other side we have the four buttons for the notes and joystick for pitch bend  and modulation as somehow they showed up on synthesizers and never went away.  I thought I'd go with that.  Two sliders for whatever.  You can assign some continuous controller to that and adjust your sound and whatever  you do with the MIDI controller.  On the lower side we have now a slider.  The slider next to the pressure sensor is used to encode the octaves and the whole range  is mapped to just four.  If you want more octaves you can program them in.  You can actually solve this in software which is nice but it becomes hard to find.  Your tape that way after some time.  And we have a battery as a power supply so few cables now.  I'm missing the next button.  Problem is nothing I've ever done is actually new as I found out.  And there's tons of prior art out there.  In the comment section of the Godophone blog you find lots of people asking questions for  their own builds.  So there are really, really a lot of EWIs out there.  As I said, Instructables.  This is the wireless Godophone.  Some build I found.  This one is interesting.  It is a device by Nias Dina who started to design these things in the 60s and built the  first ones in the 70s.  And then actually designed the one big commercially available product from archive.  This is a Nias Dina design.  So there's actually one person doing all this thing out there.  There are a lot of builds.  These things are available and I have never witnessed one being used in some kind of performance.  So they exist and nobody uses them.  Which was kind of a mystery to me.  So there are the reasons why these things exist.  There are a lot of practical reasons.  There are artistic reasons you can control.  Not just synthesizers, you can control your light show.  And this might make sense in some settings.  But the really big advantage of EWIs is that by traditional instruments have an interface  that is mostly defined by the underlying physics.  With an electronic device you can do what you want.  You have no such constraints and you can build an instrument for somebody who has maybe a  non-standard number of fingers or hands.  Another idea would be to ditch the breath control completely, replace it with a foot  pedal and you can build a wind instrument that somebody with weakened lung or some other  problems can actually play.  So there is the main reason to design these things.  To build instruments that otherwise, for people that otherwise couldn't, can play an instrument.  As an example, I have the sketch of an EWI for a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a very long  neck, reinforced steel mouthpiece, reinforced claw pads and another band control input that  allows the T-Rex with its poor fine motor skills to actually play this thing.  Another good reason to build those is to understand what's there.  What we have here is the device that is built by Archi and in the circle there's a set of  metal rollers.  And they are opposite of the left-hand finger pads.  They react to touch.  They can be moved but they don't detect movement.  And I've seen this and I didn't understand why somebody would build such an interface.  And then I built this.  We have a question.  Oh, thank you.  So if you're really interested, I own this device and I know how to play it.  And if you know how to play a saxophone, it's completely obvious why you want to build it  that way.  I understood it later because this is the only wind instrument that I actually own and  I can't play it.  Which is a shame, I'm planning to learn it since two years or so.  Excuse me, are there saxophone players here in the room?  Maybe they can help you with that.  I actually figured it out because this setup with the octave selection opposite of the left-hand  fingers doesn't work so well.  You're pushing on the slider and at the same time pushing against your fingers so you can  play notes that require you to release all your fingers.  You're just pushing the instrument out of your mouth and that may be a chromatic element  but it doesn't really work.  This could be meditated in several ways with an extrap like many traditional instruments.  But in the end I found out that these rollers at the archive are actually used for a tape  selection.  So no real new idea there.  And because they react to touch, you don't really have to push against your fingers.  You can move your left-hand fingers completely independent from your thumb and because these  rollers give you really good feedback where your thumb is much better than the mechanical  slider.  So, yeah, by building my own device I kind of imitated accidentally the big one by archive  and got to understand why they did what they did, how they came to these conclusions and  I got a really nice understanding about electronic wind instruments.  So this is another good reason why you might want to build such a device.  Yeah, come on.  Yeah, if you thought you would see something revolutionary here, they exist since the 60s.  They make sense.  If you have a T-Rex in your life who wants to play wind instrument, now you can build  one for him.  And you probably should if you want to understand these devices.  They pose some interesting software problems.  You don't want to spam your synthesizer, but you want to have continuous breath control  the whole time and you have to balance that out.  The sensor is not quite straightforward and there are a lot of interesting problems to  solve them.  If you don't want to start from scratch, here are the links and the God of Phone page is  great.  There are several builds, several different control schemes and there is a lot of theory  in there, lots of source code and lots of solutions.  At Patchman there is the historical reference.  There are the devices of Nias Diener and some other exotic builds.  Hopkins electronic aero phone is actually wireless, which might be interesting to build  if you enter that.  And of course we have the Nibbletronic which you have seen here and several pictures.  So thank you very much.  I have the, I'm under the impression that I've been quite fast this time.  I'm kind of as relieved as you and are there any questions?  Fantastic.  Thank you very much.  See you, Trap.  I think we all appreciate it that you come over to speak about a Nibble instrument.  Actually I can help you as well to point you to some saxophone players who play this Akai  kind of devices.  Are there people here among the audience who play this instrument?  Is there a possibility maybe to show as well the instruments because you have it here in  your box?  I actually brought it with me.  And the full bill of materials is on the page and are some bought, which you can't  order less than six.  So I don't want to find an orchestra.  Not yet, but there are enough people here to make that kind of band.  Is this functional?  Can we test it without having damages?  Not right now.  The firmware is kind of bugged currently.  I came here to finish the development and to work on the next iteration because as I  said, this solution for octave selection is less than ideal.  Probably there are some people who can help you with that.  Are there?  I thought that maybe some people around here might know something about building hardware.  I'm not sure, but I don't see any hands yet.  No one?  There.  Okay.  We found one.  Second.  Very nice.  Okay, there are questions I presume.  Here from the internet.  Yes, the question is why did you choose a non-canonical setup for the finger buttons?  A non what?  Excuse me, can you repeat that please?  Why have you chosen a non-canonical setup for the finger buttons?  I hated playing the recorder at school and I wanted to go as far away as possible from  that.  I love that.  We know that feeling I presume.  Is there another question somewhere here?  Maybe.  Oh yeah, one second.  Please take the microphone, sir.  Playing the buttons.  Yeah.  What exactly does the breath do?  What does the pressure sensor do?  Is it for volume?  It controls the channel volume.  I think it's CC7 or something like that of the whole synthesizer.  So you can define your volume envelope for each note.  Okay, thank you.  Right.  Is there someone else?  Question?  There are four mics here.  Someone on the internet.  Yes, there, please, sir.  Take the mic.  So if you want to see somebody who's really good at it playing the acaiivi, you go to  YouTube and search for original arrays by Michael Brecker and then you see a super original  arrays played by Michael Brecker and his band.  Thank you.  No one else here with a suggestion.  Is there a band that can be now assembled here in the back?  No.  Thank you very much.  Once again, thank you C-Trap for this fantastic presentation.  Thank you.
33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_0_1691.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_1692_5519.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_5520_5639.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_5640_8867.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_8868_9335.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_9336_13583.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_13584_21299.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_21300_21803.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_21804_21875.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_21876_21923.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_21924_21971.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_21972_22247.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_22248_22475.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_22476_23735.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_23736_24551.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_24552_25235.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_25236_25343.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_25344_27227.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_27228_30071.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_30072_30167.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_30168_30227.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_30228_30599.png 33c3-7925-the_nibbletronic_30600_30915.png