This is an idea I’ve had for a while now, but now that I’ve finally got a soundcard that can run at a decent latency in ASIO without randomly crashing (theat’s the last time I buy anything from M-Audio :?), I can finally start on it.
Basically, it’s going to be a simple VST host that’s designed to stream audio from it’s input, through a bunch of plugins, to it’s output, for playing guitars through. Where it’s different from other hosts, though is how you can control the plugins. Instead of allowing their parameters to be controlled from MIDI signals, and the terrible 7-bit resolution they use, I’m going to use a joystick interface. The good thing about joysticks is that they have 16-bit resolution on their axes, allowing for nice smooth expression pedals.
Joysticks are also cheap, so the next step is to get hold of a cheap (say, £5) analogue joystick, and hack it apart, connecting the circuitry up to a bunch of switches and the joystick axes to build a (physical) pedal board. I’ve done this before, to build myself an arcade style joystick, so I know it’s pretty simple to do:
To be honest, I’m not sure anyone else will be interested in this project, as you’ll have to do a bit of diy, but I’ve got a basic application working already (it just streams audio from the input to the output at the moment, but you can add plugin objects by right-clicking in the PluginOrganiser). Source code: http://www.niallmoody.com/downloads/NPBSource.zip
Can anyone tell me why I couldn’t upload the .exe to my website? It kept telling me it was a virus :?: :!:
- Niall.