The Superstylonanophone 2 – Foot Controller

[Note: this post was originally a comment on the post ‘The Superstylonanophone‘, but it was hard to find there and the images disappeared when I changed my website. where they were stored.  So I’ve trashed the comment and transferred the text and images here].

I mentioned in the above post that a foot controller would be useful for playing drums via the Superstylonanphone, and that I had added a 15-pin socket to the back of the device for this purpose.

This is the controller I made for it:

Yes, it looks like a length of plastic guttering – but I did say somewhere on the blog that I was looking for low-cost ways of achieving things . . . I found this in my garden shed: it was an offcut left over from a length I bought some time ago at a car boot sale.

The player side is to the left, and the 4 single-pole momentary switches are inclined slightly this way, for ease of use. The two on the left are for hi-hat sounds, the two on the right for bass drum sounds. The 15-pin cable is plugged in on the right hand-side, away from the player’s feet.

Inside you can see the simple connections from the switches to the socket – no electronics required, the Superstylonanophone recognises the switch presses and outputs MIDI instructions accordingly.

(When I connected wires inside the Superstylonanophone, I made a diagram to show which notes or which drums were connected to which of the 15 pins, so I knew which pin to connect to which switch in the foot controller).

This, together with the two styluses, has made playing MIDI drums a little more natural on the Superstylonanophone.

[Edit: this foot controller has had further modifications, albeit for a different purpose.  See here.]

Alternative Keyboards 5 – postscript

[Note: this post was originally a comment I appended to the post ‘Alternative Keyboards 4‘, which was about my double QWERTY keyboard instrument.  In that place it was hard to find, and the illustrations disappeared when I changed my website, so I’m trashing the comment and transferring the text and images here].

In order to play the ‘blue’ keyboard (the left-hand one) properly, the Shift key needs to be pressed down so that it outputs different ASCII codes to the ‘red’ (right-hand) keyboard. Using ‘Caps Lock’ doesn’t work, as this only affects the letter keys, not the numbers or other characters.

It would be awkward to have to press the Shift key at the same time as pressing a note key every time, so this keyboard needed something to keep the Shift key pressed while playing. I didn’t want to do anything permanent to the keyboard, like gluing the key down, so I looked for a suitable clip, which could be slid on and off when needed.

There are two types of clips that do this job: a drawing board clip, used by artists and architects; and a table cloth clip, as used in the home. They all look something like this:

For a drawing board or table, the flat side would be on top and the bent side, which acts a spring, putting pressure on the end and holding it tight, would be out of the way underneath. For my application, I needed to use it the opposite way round, with the flat side underneath, so the keyboard could still stand on the desktop in the usual way.

I liked the look of the drawing board clip best, but in the end I found some table cloth clips in the sale in a local home shop, and bough those. They looked like this:

Because i thought they stuck up rather high and might interfere with playing, I experimented with bending them into flatter shapes. This is the one I currently use:

In this way, the ‘blue’ keyboard outputs different ASCII numbers from the ‘red’ keyboard, and can be interpreted separately by the program Pure Data which I use with the ‘double-keyboard’ arrangement.