On the Products page, you can now find links to old stuff like MIDITab, my experimental Wacom-tablet-to-MIDI interface. Enjoy.
Also, I killed some of the comment spam. Yay!
Posted by russell at September 10, 2004 10:36 AMGreat to see it back!
I never took the time to say thanks for such a great tool. I've used MIDITab live with Reaktor to control many different parameters of a sample player simultaneusly. Works great with my laptop and Intuos 2 tablet.
I'm afraid it's not a software for the masses, so maybe I don't have many chances of seeing a new version soon, but I'd like to propose what I would like to see:
When I first used MIDITab, I had the idea of building a instrument in Reaktor that would recognize in which area of the tablet you are clicking, and then route the signal to different control channels. I did some experiments on this, but quickly it becomes quite complex. The idea is to imagine a virtual keyboard, or something like a chess board on the tablet. let's say we have 8x8 areas, 64 squares. Those coulde be used as buttons, to turn tracks or paremeters on and off, or for example we could rotate the pen with the tip in one of the 64 areas to turn a virtual knob. This way the tablet would be a grid of 64 knobs.
I believe using it for knobs can be a little tricky, but I'm sure I could use 10 x 10 = 100 switches to perform live only using a tablet and a laptop.
And you could easily multiply this by ten, if for example you use the first row of switches to select a bank of parameters. A click on one of the first top 10 virtual buttons selects to which intrument to route the remaining 90 virtual buttons. That's 900 buttons on a wacom :)
Since I am a programmer (web, no applications anymore) I wouldn't mind having no interface, just a text file where to configure the whole thing. an easy set up would split the tablet in two. left part sends x,y,pressure... to certain channels, the right part to some different channels.
I think there would be tons of ways of using it. I just describe two more: having 10 vertical sliders on the tablet. each transmits the y position to a different channel. Or having a step sequencer that runs from left to right of the tablet, 16 steps, let's say 8 tracks. the tip+pressure set a note, the eraser deletes them :)
All this of course could be done outside MIDITab, on MIDI level with conditional rules. But not all applications allow such control of MIDI.
Am I too crazy? =)
Any oppinions about these ideas?
In any case, MIDITab is cool :)
Abe
Posted by: Abe Pazos at December 11, 2004 5:53 PMThis is a great idea. Hopefully by reading the above statement you have created the Reaktor software...
You could make a printout and stick it behind the wacom tablet... ;)
Posted by: Cameron Charles at May 15, 2005 11:27 AMNever mind it is different software altogether.... Does anyone have a tutorial link or quick description on how to go about making a midi controller for the WACOM Tablet... or at least a primer... that looks like a beast of a program to use.
Posted by: Cameron Charles at May 15, 2005 11:44 AM