m00dawg

I am curious as to why you want to build over buy? Controllers might appear expensive when you first look at them, but in reality, making a DIY controller that looks a polished as a commercial one is likely to end up costing you more and can take a great deal of time and effort to do. Yes, it will be far more enjoyable, unique, and generally worth it; but it is often no small project. If you really want to make your own, I would actually recommend you buy a commercial one first so you have something to use while you work on yours. You can also get ideas for what might work and what might not with your own layout. Second, I would start small. Get a CORE, an LCD, some buttons and some protoboards and make something small so you become comfortable with how everything works with CORE and the MidiBox platform. Once you have that, you can start planning for your design, parts, etc. for your actual controller. As far as planning, you have to consider how everything will mount and fit inside whatever enclosure you opt to use or make. That is going to take some trial and error, surely, so be prepared for that. Ponoko is a great place you can use for plastic enclosures (see the Sammich synths) and is cost effective. I am going to use it to prototype my own control surface for my MBSID before I have that made on aluminum (which you can have made via Front Panel Express here in the US).

I don't know anything official but if I recall, v2's control surface will work with v3 so if you're going to make your own custom design, you could likely start now. For the MB-6582 and sammichSID, it would be more involved because the v3 CORE would have to sit outside the MB-6582 case or you would need to make a custom enclosure or something like that. +1 on wanting to hear more about v3 though. I know it's in the works, but there hasn't been much official information on it. I suspect MBSEQ is probably still the top priority.

Looks similar to the normal design so this should help. Be aware that most of the designs you see, at least for MBSID, use 3mm leds. I have opted to make my LED Matrix solution that, while it's not quite done yet, you might be able to get some ideas from if you wanted to make your own. The top board is basically a printed board that can use 3mm LEDs and includes the buttons around the matrix. You could either use it with a normal DOUT module or do something like my daughterboard solution (most practical if you are putting shift registers on your control surface boards themselves rather than using DOUT modules). It's untested currently but is on the short list to have fabbed here soon (I'm hoping a month but that might be over-realistic). The designs, however, are available as Eagle files if you want to make changes and try it yourself.

Indeed it probably won't be thick enough to handle it - the chassis is entirely supported by the front panel. I could probably have it sit on my mic-amp or flip my shelf over and have it sit on that, but I'll probably just leave it out of the rack - I'll have to be adding boards and things to it and working on the internal layout anyway. Turns out it will be more like $60 after engraving work and the additional mounting holes but that's still pretty dern cheap!

Man I'm trying to find that thread but I must be really bad at searching :) Happen to have a link?

Helpful enough :) I didn't think I could just get laser transparency sheets for my printer and just compare that way as well. Now that I know Ponoko panels are so inexpensive, that really helps too since $40 is almost within risk-taking :)

You save a copy of your board layouts as DXF? How do you do that exactly? I didn't see an option for that in Eagle, but man being able ot see the panel on top of the boards would be a huge help. Right now, I just print them out and hold both up to a light source ;)

Line weights and colors were the two issues I ran into. Now that I know how to fix them, converting should be easy such that I'll probably go ahead and order a panel here in a few weeks. Will HUGELY simply things by having something to work on. Very cool!

*WOW* So apparently my 3U panel is only about $40.00 US to make via Ponoko. That doesn't include any engraving or the screw holes I will need to use (instead of the hidden screw holes I had on my aluminum version) but even the thickness is what I wanted (3mm). I'll have to figure out how to constrain my sizes a bit - I had to use the largest size available from Ponoko to fit my 3U panel so I'll have to look into that further. It also took a bit of work to get it from Front Panel, mostly due to having to change line colors and widths. I haven't tried lettering yet (I just exported the cuts). But I think this could be a very viable option, thanks for the idea, sidmonster!

Ah good idea! I wonder if FPE lets you put images in the background...hmm... I had originally written of Pokono due to not being able to export my panel from FPE, but I now see there are options to do that, so yeah that's an option I'll have to consider! Might actually even look cooler in acrylic anyway, although I'm guessing I can't do fancy things like blind threaded holes and such.

How do you make your wood panel? Just by hand?

Hah good call on comparing datasheet measurements :) Just realized the buttons I was going to get might flare too much if they stick out too far from the control surface. The biggest issue I am concerned about is missing a measurement between the control surface board and front panel (so a button is off by some amount). So far, everything has lined up perfectly when comparing print-outs on top of each other. But, man, dropping $250 on a panel makes me nervous :)

I am about 75% of the way done with my control surface board wiring. I already have the positions of the knobs and stuff and, as best as I can tell, things appear to line up with my panel, both with measuring and eyeballing (by printing both out and comparing them on top of each other). The panel is going to run probably about $250 from FrontPanel Express and I am trying to figure out how best to approach things. So I'm curious what some of you custom control surface peeps do? Do you prototype your front panel and, if so, how exactly do you do that? I thought about cardboard, but I'm not sure how accurate I can be while still getting a good measurement and letting my buttons function as they should. I would actually rather buy the panel and hope :) That way I can mount the control boards as I finish them, have a visual stimulus I can work towards, and if I mess up a measurement, I can remake a control board cheaper than having to make a whole new panel. Advice is much appreciated as I'm a bit stumped :)

Agreed. Makes me want to grab up a Launchpad like right now :)

I bought mine from Jameco. Perhaps you can use it for this as well, although bulk ordered front panels may not work perfectly in that case. And that only applies if you're going Rackmount, of course. If you're not doing a rack, you could just build a wooden case or something similar.

Front Panel Express is available here in the States for one-off runs. They have a cousin company in Germany that does the same thing, though the name escapes me. It's not cheap, but you can order as few as one (which is still cheaper than having to order 10 I would think). Pokono also makes laser-cut plastic things which you could use as a front panel (check out the sammichFM and sammichSID for some ideas there).

Ah well look at it this way, if you do your own enclosure, you can make it 100% your own design. Yes, it's more expensive (one reason I haven't finished my rackmount SID yet) but it will be unique and can fit your preferences. On the other hand, doing a custom enclosure for something you haven't used yet might be a tall order :) but still, it's an option! Otherwise, you can just build most of the control surface on protoboards and things and just play around with it until you decide how you want to proceed.

That's just gotta be crazy-go-nuts! I will say, though, that the bassline engine is wildly good! Trying to do something like that using a DAW is an exercise in pain. EDIT: I have no idea if MBSEQ can do that type of stuff, though :) Just that trying to do it in, say, Live, isn't particularly exciting or at least fast, nor have I been able to get "that sound" other than by using the bassline sequencer.

Indeed we found an interesting genre combining surf guitar with chiptunes :) Our whole first album is Chipsurf, in fact. But this song, the guitars worked with everything else especially well. Glad you like it!

Haha dude that's a lot of basslines? Sounds like someone is asking for a challenge? ;)

Can't offer much help there since I haven't tackled that project yet. But there's plenty of information and ideas available and I hear MBSEQv4 is amazing. The basic control surface is fairly common I would say so you could probably get some things going pretty easily. Missing on bulk orders sucks but just means you'll likely have to pay a bit more for things like front panels (a rather large expense by itself unfortunately).

You can control CVs (commonly used for analog synths) but I don't think you can directly control other MIDI gear via the sequencer. I /think/ you can use the knobs for external output but I'm not 100% certain on that. Either way, what you are wanting is more like the MBSEQ.

Soldering legs should not be a difficult exercise. If you are having trouble, I recommend starting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4.

Thanks! Been getting a few comments about that part, although my favorite part is right before with that crazy WHOOOSH thing. It's a classic surf guitar slide plus copious amount of flange and a rolling low-pass filter sweep type of thing. That gave me a renewed faith in Live's otherwise lackluster filters (I use the 8-band EQ and manually automated a sweep, so it wasn't one of Live's true filters, to be fair).

Indeed I'm quite proud of the mixing work I've done with it and everything really fits really well I think. My band-mate has been handling all the surf guitar for this album and he did a fantastic job with the leads and things on this one. On the note of the high quality, I have found the distortion on the guitars seems to be where you tend to hear it. After fixing the aliasing issues (I basically removed the bit-cruncher on the guitars during the intro), the differences become rather subtle but I tend to prefer the higher quality version when listening on my good headphones. Could be merely subjective at this point, though. It's not perfect (is it ever?) - mix sounds a bit muddled in places due to all the reverb. I can get away with some of that due to the genre but it still sounds a bit over the top in places when listening on lesser headphones but still something I consider a personal achievement. I really dig doing mixing/mastering work. *shrug*