DIY midi control unit?

all i want to do is make a midi control unit with something like 100 knobs. i make alot of elaborate things in max/msp and need huge amounts of knobs to randomly hook up to things.

so im wondering if theres some DIY sources anywhere that would help me with this.

What could you possibly use 100 knobs for?

I've never even seen anything that comes close even when I used to produce videos and did the mastering at AT&T studios which has a state of the art setup. They did video production for major networks like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime etc. Even then they used much smaller rack units that fit in their main console. If one went down they could easily swap it out.

Truthfully you would need to be a technical guru and have major cad experience to design it on a computer. Then for funding you need a bank loan to finance the building of it. You'd also probibly need the experience of an entire team of engineers to even plan the design. I've been an electronic tech for 40 years and I wouldnt even think of attempting it nor could I dream up an application for it.

Heres a link to schematics and resources. http://www.audiomulch.com/midipic/

This one only has 10 knobs or so and comes close to building a laptop board from scratch http://www.ucapps.de/

I realize I'm being overly critical in my remarks here. But realistically, with digital design, you can have one knob with a 10 banks, another knob that multiplies that 10 by 10 and so on. Thats 100 settings with only two knobs, See what I'm driving at. Midi doesnt need 100 knobs to accomplish anything you can possibly think of.

Microcontrol has certainly made things easier (PIC, AVR...while STAMP is OK for intro, I think you run into its limitations quickly and it gets frustrating)

though, honestly, I think you'd be better off just buying a couple of the commercially available knob boxes and if you are just getting into working with MIDI and microcontrol, there are probably more interesting projects (working on a massive CC box would be basically the same thing just a lot of times, which is better suited to a dedicated manufacturing operation)

I can understand the desire, -- it's not really a systems capability issue, it's a UI issue

for the "one control parameter" UI - esp for performance-time applications can be really helpful

I've never particularly cared for the parameter & value dual encoder myself.

I am a Midiot from the dawn of the spec, and though I've spent several years away from it, 100 knobs seems like overkill for the sake of overkill?

The basic, old MIDI 1.0 provides for 16 channels. It's a 31,250 baud serial connection, basically. It is very much like a player piano in many regards.

The "Big Three" channel messages are Note-on, Note-off, and Aftertouch. A knob won't be good for Note-on/Note-off, unless you are inventing an analog synth, and there have been a lot of good ones already.

There are additional things that can be sent by MIDI, Pitch-bend, Velocity, and several Continuous Controllers that can be mapped to do many things. System Exclusive messages can be dumped down the pipe to make programming changes to the patch on the fly. Program Change can do what it says, Breath controllers can open filters, crank up/down modulation, or be remapped to pitchbend. I realize that everything I mentioned can be multiplied by 16 for the various channels, but some/most of these are not real-time things. 100 knobs wouldn't be helpful. Unless you are a modular synth geek, and they have their own weirdness. I'm pretty weird, but I don't have one. The modular guys are in knob heaven...

I am heading down a path here, that I have recently explained within the limits of my knowledge a while back. I am mostly a keyboard guy, I am fairly active on a huge organ forum. While my interests currently lie mostly in Hammond/Leslie stuff, there is an amazing group of every kind of organ geek in the world.

A bunch of these guys are into putting little switches under their keybeds, and adding MIDI to them. Many of these guys are organ experts of the first degree; they have huge pipe organs in their home, some of them own a dozen Hammonds. Some of these guys were preparing to spend lots of money on MIDI stuff, to just hope that it could work.

As a Midiot, I posted a big long thing here about it. Please check it out, it covers a lot of bases.

thx-Scott S.

I dont even know what im looking at haha

That's a big old modular synth. It looks like "knobs, for the sake of knobs", but there is a method to it's madness. A modular synth is made of modules, each one does a specific thing, and you hook them together with patch cables to make a sound. You cannot store your resulting sound. They are a piece of history, and in most ways dinosaurs now. There remain fanatic people who use them, and there are actually more manufacturers of them now, than there were at the dawn of synthesis.

thx-Scott S.

Thats how synth sound was created with analog gear. They can do all that with a couple of digital chips now. In electronics, size does matter.

application: i have huge elaborate patches, intended strictly for live use. like right now i have a drum machine with several channels, and about 50 controls for each lane. start of sample, end of sample, reverb time, reverb wet/dry, send 1, send 2, pitch, volume. etc.

then i have several synths all with 20-50 controls.

i have an m-audio keystation pro-88, which has 24 knobs, 9 sliders and about 20 buttons. that doesnt even come close to doing anything on this because i want this patch to work for strictly live performances. so i need {censored}loads of knobs.

this patch is basically a DAW for only live work. so try to imagine for instance the ReDrum drum machine from reason, and now i have to control it with a midi controller. but no midi controllers have that many knobs. i want to make something like that.

FWIW - I don't have a problem with the application (from the CV days myself)

but I think a one-off build of this type would be costly, time consuming, hard to debug, etc (esp if you aren't already set up for microcontrol)

I think a more expedient, less costly solution would be to gang a few of the already-in-production "knob boxes"

yeah. thats my fallback plan. its just im going to be using up all my usb ports now, haha.

why would it have to use all your usb ports?

have you considered thru-chaining them 5 pin din style

yeah good point. i havent used midi in a while, i forgot about that.

Aha,that's a good idea, it's useful!