>It's a nice dream, of a synthesizer where any knob can be pulled out and replaced with a patch cable, and any jack can have a knob plugged into it to set it to a fixed value.
What's even better, though, is a coupled knob + jack where the knob turns into an attenuator for the input when a cable is plugged in, and works as a standalone knob otherwise. I think this is quite a common design.
I believe I've also seen patch cables with built-in attenuators.
kennywinker 24 minutes ago [-]
Another common pattern is jack + offset. The most useful is when you have jack + offset + attenuator… but most modules pick one or the other for space reasons.
joemi 2 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting idea (truly a clever way to accomplish this!), but I think it's addressing the symptom, not the problem. The symptom is that some jacks don't have associated knobs. The problem is that either the module designer or the module user is overly obsessed with miniaturization. The designer is at fault if it's a parameter that really should have had a knob with the jack and they avoided including one in order to keep things small. The user is at fault if they're trying to stay so space-constrained that they can't fit a module that outputs an DC voltage set by a knob into their case. There are numerous modules that do this (and often that attenuvert as well) and many of them are fairly small too.
arnorhs 2 hours ago [-]
This looks super neat and probably a fun project to build.
> It's a nice dream, of a synthesizer where any knob can be pulled out and replaced with a patch cable, and any jack can have a knob plugged into it to set it to a fixed value. Whether it's actually practical to build a synth like this I'm unsure. It would probably only be worthwhile if you applied it to every single control on the modular, which rules out using other people's modules. You would have to invest heavily into the Eurorack Knob Idea. You couldn't even port other modules that easily, as many of them would expect a real potentiometer, whereas the encoder can only produce a voltage. Coupling it with a voltage-controlled potentiometer would work, but would be even more expensive.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine this fitting in nicely to everything since it's defintely more effort and work than just having a knob and a jack for the control of a particular thing. Esp. since most of the time, as a convention, you'll have a knob that controls the value, but when a jack is plugged in, this same knob acts as the attenuator for the signal.
I would have appreciated having an image or a pdf of the schematic for the design to understand it properly - i can get it from your github but I don't have kicad installed on this computer.
I'm esp. interested in the normalized behavior - ie. when you have a signal plugged in to the jack that is _not_ the potentiometer.. does it get passed through or does it have to go through this chip as well?
Having to supply a 3V to this to make it work as well is also an extra requirement of its usefulness in normal eurorack circuits - not a total dealbreaker but that does add extra requirements, and extra components to one's design.
Anyways... really cool idea :)
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
It's interesting. I haven't been sucked into the Eurorack thing though — do people want not just patch cables all over their mixing desk but knobs as well?
Eurorack (and modular synths in general) seem like funny things. Like guitar pedals, I sense there are a lot of enthusiasts that do a lot more tinkering than actually playing them. Watching Rick Beato and guests on YouTube ... seems like a lot of musicians are looking instead for simplicity. Like a few good sounding pedals that, ideally, each have just a knob or two.
Maybe the synth-heads are in a whole different headspace though.
diggan 2 hours ago [-]
> It's interesting. I haven't been sucked into the Eurorack thing though — do people want not just patch cables all over their mixing desk but knobs as well?
I don't personally feel the need of wanting more cables all over my current setup, but sometimes I have had the feeling of "Oh if I could just modulate the VCF Cutoff on my Zen Delay with a patch cable from my modular instead of doing it manually" for some of the desktop units I have next to the modular.
And on the other side, I've also felt the need of having some of the patch holes replaced by knobs, so I could just twist and turn it to evaluate if I want to modulate it, instead of having to actually setup the patch. I could see something like this knob-idea being very useful for that, basically prototyping patches.
> I sense there are a lot of enthusiasts that do a lot more tinkering
This is definitely true, large parts of the community is about tinkering more than making music. But the same is true for programming, large parts of the community is not about problem solving, but coding. That's fine, we all have different motivations :)
What I found really useful (for myself at least) is to try to connect with people who are artists first, who just happen to be using modular synths, rather than finding people tinkering with modular synths who don't actually produce/perform music.
> I haven't been sucked into the Eurorack thing though
Good for you :) A friend pulled me into this dark abyss a month ago. Lots of fun, so many distractions, but lots of fun. Helps that Barcelona (where I live) have a lively community around modular synths as well. It is expensive though, and VCVRack doesn't come close to providing the same experience.
ericwood 1 hours ago [-]
> Like a few good sounding pedals that, ideally, each have just a knob or two.
It makes for a nice narrative but I haven't found it holds much water; musicians are all over the place on this spectrum. You'll find both extremes very well represented, and a good chunk of people who compartmentalize their "dayjob" music and tinkering. I've found a lot of successful musicians love to tinker and are always on the search for new inspiration. Like any good craftsperson they take some amount of pride in their tools and I've been blown away by how technical many can get on the electronics side! It's always funny to see Reverb auctions go up for famous musicians and finding out a bassist in a pop punk band owns a bunch of weird synthesizers :)
Simple one to two knob pedals are a big deal but you'll see a very large number of pros touring with extremely complicated modeling setups and all sorts of gadgets. At a certain point you really know what you want, and having the ability to dial that in is important! I tend to gravitate towards simplicity in a band setting but I know a lot of people who want dirt pedals with 10 knobs so they can dial in the sounds they hear in their heads.
butlike 1 hours ago [-]
Your pedal board/modular synth is a reflection of your personality.
ericwood 1 hours ago [-]
Just like real life I have a tidy put together functional board, then a disturbing spaghetti mess tucked away in a corner that few are allowed to see
2mlWQbCK 47 minutes ago [-]
My favorite documentary I have not seen (yet), I Dream of Wires from 2013, about modular synthesizers. I know in some trailer there was a maker of modules saying something to the effect that if only people actually making music with their synths bought modules he would be out of business. Can't find that trailer now or I did not watch carefully enough now. There are a few different ones on youtube.
A lot of the music is made just playing with different parts of the sound, and having all the controls exposed to be messed with can lead to more creativity.
IMO, kind of like how I enjoy Linux configuration files, in a way, more than I do a GUI that covers up 90% of the guts of an application or server software.
butlike 1 hours ago [-]
The knobs tend to be the "public API" and the patch cables the wiring up of the functionality to that public API. having a knob for each patch is akin to making every method 'public' instead of protected or private.
bondarchuk 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe they are tinkering, but sounds still come out while they are tinkering. So maybe they're playing music after all? The idea that if you're not recording and releasing tracks you're doing it "wrong" is a bit silly IMO. Just strumming a guitar or playing some chords on a piano without recording any of it was always an "acceptable" hobby and not considered "unmusical", playing with synths and sequencers is no different IMO.
tym0 2 hours ago [-]
It's somewhat similar to people enjoying developing their game engine more than their game in my experience.
Provably why in attracted to it despite having little musical talent :)
diggan 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting idea for sure, but how is the feel of actually turning the knob? Seems to offer short to no resistance, which would make fast but precise movements pretty hard, something that is important for things like performances.
What would be a huge bonus point (but maybe unrealistic? I don't quite understand how the current implementation actually works) would be software-configurable resistance (physical, not electrical). I've spent a lot of time for my DIY modules to find the right knobs, or the right process to adjust the resistance of my existing knobs, being able to control that digitally could introduce a whole new level of fun.
The complexity of this approach (ignoring the display and flair) unfortunately means you won’t see this used too often due to cost.
weinzierl 2 hours ago [-]
My dream is a piano keyboard with entirely software controlled mechanical key response. Every key individually mounted on a servostepper. As a bonus it could be used as a fake player piano. Or for practice you could make the wrong keys hard to press. Endless possibilities.
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 2 hours ago [-]
Great idea and I’m shocked this doesn’t exist.
adamgordonbell 2 hours ago [-]
> Or for practice you could make the wrong keys hard to press.
This seems like a pretty cool idea
tarentel 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not convinced it would work very well on making you a better player but who knows. Either way, it sounds like a good way to injure yourself. Piano is a very percussive instrument and if you're hitting the keys with any force and they don't give the way you expect them to I imagine that won't be very great for your joints.
diggan 2 hours ago [-]
That's so cool on so many levels, and I really enjoyed that indeed, now I have to fight the urge to try to build it myself, good thing it's weekend.
However, it does seem to miss the single most useful feature (for me) which is the resistance part. I understand there is a DC motor controlling the snap points and whatnot, but what I'd like is constant resistance I guess, to a configurable level, rather than snapping to specific points and such.
I don't think it would be possible to hack on top of the already made hardware, but didn't seem like it was already done in the software side of things, although I did skim through things so maybe I missed it.
pakue 2 hours ago [-]
Should be doable to add that. The BLDC needs to add a proportional (or any other function) force against the rotation direction until it reaches 0.
diggan 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds reasonable, wonder how that would actually feel in real life? As far as I understand, this would pass through digital parts, adding a little bit of (maybe noticeable) latency, but I wonder if the latency gets high enough for it to be a bit jarring that the resistance is dynamically changing as you apply torque.
scottapotamas 35 minutes ago [-]
This is all fairly normal in robotics, under a subset of (slightly overloaded naming sorry) “impedance control”
adolph 2 hours ago [-]
A differently complex and smaller approach might be to combine the knob with with an axial flux PCB-BLDC, like what Carl Bugeja made [0, 1]. It might be suited to get haptics in something as small as the article's knob, although to get an in-built display you'd have to use one of those displays that fit in lego bricks [2, 3] with a slip-ring.
Many thanks for the links/references. I don't really care about the display itself (probably prefer without it actually), but never saw those other links before, interesting stuff.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
"It's a beautiful dream – a very expensive, but beautiful dream."
While that might be true, what is expensive for me is chump change for someone else. However, that is very difficult to grok as there was no prices mentioned anywhere that I could see. Sure, it'll be expensive to me because I have to ask. But I also know that I cannot afford a fully spec'd out MacPro, but at least I can see the numbers.
alnwlsn 50 minutes ago [-]
> any jack can have a knob plugged into it to set it to a fixed value.
I'm kind of surprised he didn't start with a knob with a tiny accelerometer, mcu and battery in it to produce some sort of output signal into a stock plug depending on how the knob is oriented with respect to gravity.
I was wondering this - I'd buy this if I could just plug it into my existing sockets. I'm pretty sure you could get 50-100 hrs with a battery, but I wonder if you could have something that you wind-up like a mechanical watch.
jimbokun 2 hours ago [-]
I liked the video focused on his hands, where his gestures and expressing the rough size and orientation of things added to his verbal description. Not sure if this is a common technique, but works very well for this topic.
Gracana 1 hours ago [-]
This Old Tony (a hobby machinist / welder on youtube) has made all of his videos in that format. It works very well!
This is so cool and so clever I'm in awe, really. I'm grinning from ear to ear looking at this and jealous I didn't think of it. But the problem it solves is not quite one that anyone has. What does it offer over a built-in knob with a jack that overrides it beside compactness? A knob that's not designed for feel that you can misplace?
There's a miniature case study in thinking about innovation here. This is what the germ of a really neat idea looks like but you have to keep going and that's hard.
I'd be tempted to eliminate the patch cord altogether by using one of those pushbutton pots. Normally it would act like a traditional pot, but if you push it, it would go into a mode where you could choose from a variety of nearby inputs wirelessly.
The LEDs next to the pot would need to be an OLED display that indicates the selected input. Some form of extremely lightweight mesh network for control connections would need to exist, something with very low bandwidth and short range but also low latency. After 5 or 10 years' worth of tinkering, it might actually synthesize some sounds.
buescher 1 hours ago [-]
Right - it solves the compactness problem but introduces new ones. That said, from what I've seen of other people's modular setups, keeping them from growing without bound does not seem to be the highest priority in that world.
I'd also have to wonder how well a jack would hold up under regular use as a bushing. It's very common for engineers with little exposure to the connector industry (not my background either, but I read the data sheets and app notes) to underestimate how highly engineered and optimized for their use case even decades-old connector types are.
It would be nice to have something like the NKK display pushbuttons in the knob for a rotary encoder/pushbutton.
>After 5 or 10 years' worth of tinkering, it might actually synthesize some sounds.
Fantastic idea except for the proprietary 3.5" knob. From the video it appears the magnet is required to discern position.
spankalee 2 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it be more universally compatible to have a powered knob that outputs a adjustable constant control voltage? You'd probably want trim adjustments on it too.
Yes, there'd be an extra wire to the power supply module, but that seems fine for a modular.
diggan 2 hours ago [-]
> Yes, there'd be an extra wire to the power supply module, but that seems fine for a modular.
Maybe other's modular synths look/work differently than mine, but when all the panels are installed, there is no way to pull a cable from underneath the panels/inside the case to the outside, without drilling new holes through some panel or the sides of the case. So not sure how you'd pull a cable from the power supply to the front side of a panel when it's closed like that. My case is a Intellijel Palette 104HP, maybe other cases expose the power supply to the outside?
itomato 3 hours ago [-]
I’m just waiting for the Eurorack Boombox revolution to hit.
Fredkin 3 hours ago [-]
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What's even better, though, is a coupled knob + jack where the knob turns into an attenuator for the input when a cable is plugged in, and works as a standalone knob otherwise. I think this is quite a common design.
I believe I've also seen patch cables with built-in attenuators.
> It's a nice dream, of a synthesizer where any knob can be pulled out and replaced with a patch cable, and any jack can have a knob plugged into it to set it to a fixed value. Whether it's actually practical to build a synth like this I'm unsure. It would probably only be worthwhile if you applied it to every single control on the modular, which rules out using other people's modules. You would have to invest heavily into the Eurorack Knob Idea. You couldn't even port other modules that easily, as many of them would expect a real potentiometer, whereas the encoder can only produce a voltage. Coupling it with a voltage-controlled potentiometer would work, but would be even more expensive.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine this fitting in nicely to everything since it's defintely more effort and work than just having a knob and a jack for the control of a particular thing. Esp. since most of the time, as a convention, you'll have a knob that controls the value, but when a jack is plugged in, this same knob acts as the attenuator for the signal.
I would have appreciated having an image or a pdf of the schematic for the design to understand it properly - i can get it from your github but I don't have kicad installed on this computer.
I'm esp. interested in the normalized behavior - ie. when you have a signal plugged in to the jack that is _not_ the potentiometer.. does it get passed through or does it have to go through this chip as well?
Having to supply a 3V to this to make it work as well is also an extra requirement of its usefulness in normal eurorack circuits - not a total dealbreaker but that does add extra requirements, and extra components to one's design.
Anyways... really cool idea :)
Eurorack (and modular synths in general) seem like funny things. Like guitar pedals, I sense there are a lot of enthusiasts that do a lot more tinkering than actually playing them. Watching Rick Beato and guests on YouTube ... seems like a lot of musicians are looking instead for simplicity. Like a few good sounding pedals that, ideally, each have just a knob or two.
Maybe the synth-heads are in a whole different headspace though.
I don't personally feel the need of wanting more cables all over my current setup, but sometimes I have had the feeling of "Oh if I could just modulate the VCF Cutoff on my Zen Delay with a patch cable from my modular instead of doing it manually" for some of the desktop units I have next to the modular.
And on the other side, I've also felt the need of having some of the patch holes replaced by knobs, so I could just twist and turn it to evaluate if I want to modulate it, instead of having to actually setup the patch. I could see something like this knob-idea being very useful for that, basically prototyping patches.
> I sense there are a lot of enthusiasts that do a lot more tinkering
This is definitely true, large parts of the community is about tinkering more than making music. But the same is true for programming, large parts of the community is not about problem solving, but coding. That's fine, we all have different motivations :)
What I found really useful (for myself at least) is to try to connect with people who are artists first, who just happen to be using modular synths, rather than finding people tinkering with modular synths who don't actually produce/perform music.
> I haven't been sucked into the Eurorack thing though
Good for you :) A friend pulled me into this dark abyss a month ago. Lots of fun, so many distractions, but lots of fun. Helps that Barcelona (where I live) have a lively community around modular synths as well. It is expensive though, and VCVRack doesn't come close to providing the same experience.
It makes for a nice narrative but I haven't found it holds much water; musicians are all over the place on this spectrum. You'll find both extremes very well represented, and a good chunk of people who compartmentalize their "dayjob" music and tinkering. I've found a lot of successful musicians love to tinker and are always on the search for new inspiration. Like any good craftsperson they take some amount of pride in their tools and I've been blown away by how technical many can get on the electronics side! It's always funny to see Reverb auctions go up for famous musicians and finding out a bassist in a pop punk band owns a bunch of weird synthesizers :)
Simple one to two knob pedals are a big deal but you'll see a very large number of pros touring with extremely complicated modeling setups and all sorts of gadgets. At a certain point you really know what you want, and having the ability to dial that in is important! I tend to gravitate towards simplicity in a band setting but I know a lot of people who want dirt pedals with 10 knobs so they can dial in the sounds they hear in their heads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQSxqha62j0
A lot of the music is made just playing with different parts of the sound, and having all the controls exposed to be messed with can lead to more creativity.
IMO, kind of like how I enjoy Linux configuration files, in a way, more than I do a GUI that covers up 90% of the guts of an application or server software.
What would be a huge bonus point (but maybe unrealistic? I don't quite understand how the current implementation actually works) would be software-configurable resistance (physical, not electrical). I've spent a lot of time for my DIY modules to find the right knobs, or the right process to adjust the resistance of my existing knobs, being able to control that digitally could introduce a whole new level of fun.
The complexity of this approach (ignoring the display and flair) unfortunately means you won’t see this used too often due to cost.
This seems like a pretty cool idea
However, it does seem to miss the single most useful feature (for me) which is the resistance part. I understand there is a DC motor controlling the snap points and whatnot, but what I'd like is constant resistance I guess, to a configurable level, rather than snapping to specific points and such.
I don't think it would be possible to hack on top of the already made hardware, but didn't seem like it was already done in the software side of things, although I did skim through things so maybe I missed it.
0. https://microbots.io/products/motorcell
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVszJMlvZcA
2. https://github.com/AncientJames/uGrey
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pUV_3qeHog
While that might be true, what is expensive for me is chump change for someone else. However, that is very difficult to grok as there was no prices mentioned anywhere that I could see. Sure, it'll be expensive to me because I have to ask. But I also know that I cannot afford a fully spec'd out MacPro, but at least I can see the numbers.
I'm kind of surprised he didn't start with a knob with a tiny accelerometer, mcu and battery in it to produce some sort of output signal into a stock plug depending on how the knob is oriented with respect to gravity.
Putting electronics inside the plug is nearly a mitxela trademark. https://mitxela.com/projects/flash_synth
https://www.youtube.com/c/thisoldtony/videos
There's a miniature case study in thinking about innovation here. This is what the germ of a really neat idea looks like but you have to keep going and that's hard.
I'd be tempted to eliminate the patch cord altogether by using one of those pushbutton pots. Normally it would act like a traditional pot, but if you push it, it would go into a mode where you could choose from a variety of nearby inputs wirelessly.
The LEDs next to the pot would need to be an OLED display that indicates the selected input. Some form of extremely lightweight mesh network for control connections would need to exist, something with very low bandwidth and short range but also low latency. After 5 or 10 years' worth of tinkering, it might actually synthesize some sounds.
I'd also have to wonder how well a jack would hold up under regular use as a bushing. It's very common for engineers with little exposure to the connector industry (not my background either, but I read the data sheets and app notes) to underestimate how highly engineered and optimized for their use case even decades-old connector types are.
It would be nice to have something like the NKK display pushbuttons in the knob for a rotary encoder/pushbutton.
>After 5 or 10 years' worth of tinkering, it might actually synthesize some sounds.
Yeah.
Yes, there'd be an extra wire to the power supply module, but that seems fine for a modular.
Maybe other's modular synths look/work differently than mine, but when all the panels are installed, there is no way to pull a cable from underneath the panels/inside the case to the outside, without drilling new holes through some panel or the sides of the case. So not sure how you'd pull a cable from the power supply to the front side of a panel when it's closed like that. My case is a Intellijel Palette 104HP, maybe other cases expose the power supply to the outside?