The Continuum Fingerboard

The Continuum Fingerboard is something I ran across a week or so ago an have been meaning to post about. It looks exactly like a keyboard except it has no white keys, no black keys, and no buttons... Ok, so it doesn't look like a keyboard but it kinda plays like one...well sorta...a little but not really. You will just have to check this thing out because its hard to explain. Here is a video of Jordan Rudess playing one. I'm sure it is a LOT harder to play than he makes it look since this is him completely killing this Korg Triton.

The Board was designed by Dr. Lippold Haken and manufactured by Haken Audio. It is a Midi / Firewire performance controller with one of the most original interfaces I have ever seen.

The Continuum offers real time continuous control in three directions for every finger that is placed on the playing surface. You can slide your finger up and down or side to side kinda like a laptop touch pad to get different sounds and effects. Shake you finger a little on a held note and wallah, instant vibrato. I'm sure once you got familiar with the Continuum Fingerboard you could express yourself with this instrument like no other. It is compatible with any Midi synthesizer, sound module, or sequencer.

Check out Haken Audio's website to get all the info and listen to some audio samples of this amazing instrument.

Ohm from Livid Instruments

The Ohm is high-quality MIDI instrument designed for real-time audio and video performance. It has blue lighted back lit keys for use in low lit environments such as clubs, and comes in rugged rack mount metal or handcrafted mahogany. It also features a thirty-six button clip bank, high-quality faders and knobs, BPM tap and a DJ-style crossfader.

As a DJ controller, or Ableton Live controller this thing would be awesome. It's mac or PC.

This controller provides both MIDI out and USB connectivity. For me honestly....I just think the thing looks COOL!

It does have a little sticker shock to it with a Introductory Price of $790 but It's no worse than paying $90 for a pair of jeans with holes in the knees that are sold in a store where the music is as loud as a night club....right? Anyway you can check out the Ohm here and be the judge of that.

CD Turntable Refurbishment

This little guy spent a long time in a night club. I'm sure if this thing could talk it could tell you some stories. In it's stay atop the DJ booth it inhaled a LOT of smoke and had a cocktail or two spilled on it. It's FFW and RWD buttons did not work, nor did the play button. The jog wheel was sticky, and it was just dirty all the way through. I must say it did still play cds even after all of that.

This thing was about to see the trash can when I decided to take a chance on it and see what I could do.

It took about 3 hours of cleaning and soldering to get this thing back on it's feet but when all was said and done it looks and plays like a brand new one.

I had an old broken VCR of my mom's in the trash. (because I had tried to repair it and failed) It had the same kind of buttons on it for the play and FFW as the CD player so I got out the soldering iron and started removing them from the VCR. Once I had that done I removed the gummed up ones from the CD player and re soldered the ones from the VCR on the circuit board of the player. The buttons were a little shorter so I shaved a little of the plastic from the bigger buttons (the ones you actually push, not the ones on the board) so they would go down far enough to make contact.

I cleaned everything up and let the plastic parts soak in soapy water for 15 min. or so. I used a Q-tip and alcohol to remove the pop/nicotine from the places I could not get wet. After all was said and done I basically have a near new Pioneer CDJ100S.

So, as I have said before, don't be so quick to toss that high dollar piece of equipment when it goes down. Digg into it and see what happens, after all if you mess it up who cares, it was broke anyway.

Electribe x 3

I have been on a scavenger hunt for this trio on eBay for quite some time now and I am finally finished. It took a lot of shopping but I have somehow managed to get all three of these little monsters for the price of 1 (if you were paying retail that is).

eBay is a great place to get stuff for cheap if you are willing to put the time in looking every night until that sweet deal comes along. I got my EA-1 for 60 dollars! I paid 140 for my ER-1 MK2 at a local pawn shop and just today I received my ES-1 MK2 via UPS from eBay that I paid 152 dollars for. All of these retailed for over 400 brand new and the ES-1 still retails for 599.

I cant wait to get all of these bad boys in sync and see what beats I can come up with. The ES-1 is one bad sampler I hear, Ill let ya know once I dig into it. I was looking around online for some training videos on any of the Electribe series but came up with nothing??? If anyone knows of any please let me know. I have the manuals but I like video tutorials much better.

Yeahhhh eBay!!!

Open Lab's Miko LX

Open Labs has designed the Miko specifically for the electronic artist and lifestyle. It is windows XP based with a 250gb hard disk and does it all. This thing looks incredible. It has built in touch screen, keyboard, and a cd/dvd burner. You can do Composition, Remix, and Performances with this machine.

The Miko is also a complete home theater system including surround sound and dual head video outputs capable of resolution higher than HD. It is capable of hosting up to 250 plug-ins and effects at once, playing over 500-voice polyphony. Hows that for processing power.

This workstation combines the capabilities of a professional musical keyboard, a dedicated DJ section, and control surfaces into one fully integrated-compact package with 64-bit processing technologies plus the ability to store gigs of data like vst's or anything else your pc would do.

Its basically like taking your whole studio with you.

Jonathan Davis of Korn used one of these to do a lot of his music. He plugged his guitar right into it and recorded it on the fly. Timbaland also swears by the Miko. You can plug anything into this like a mic, guitar, etc and record, edit, and burn to cd to have it ready for playing without ever touching a pc. That's a lot from a single piece of equipment no bigger than some keyboards.

The Miko also has a feature called "MimiK" which enables it to clone any digital piano or hardware sound module, even their after-touch and effects. The 15 inch touch screen will allow you to recreate the controls of the hardware that you cloned (sampled). Sweet huh?

Ok here's the kicker.....$3499. It sounds like a lot but if you really think about it you probably have that much tied up with your pc, controllers, cables and all. Anyway this thing looks way cool and I cant wait to try one out. Here is a video of the Miko in action.