Under Pressure

Introducing Hubert, a DIY pressure controller.

I got to play with the prototype last week and had a lot of fun. Here's a brief description of this hand-held device from Zauner Elektronik:

"Each channel has three outputs: CV Out, Inverted CV Out and Gate out. Each side is capable of holding the current voltage on CV Out, whereas the inverted CV appears on Inverted CV Out. If a CV is held in the CV Out you still can use the inverted out, even switching from positive to negative voltage as often as you want without disturbing the held CV output."

The hold function exhibits minimal droop and is key to working with Hubert: you can set a voltage with the pressure pads, sample it and then use the second output to generate another voltage on the same channel. This gives you a total of two dynamic and two static CVs.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Make Noise's Pressure Points but, having seen Katavist's wonderful BugBrand CTL-1/ Wiard JAG demo, I'm beginning to wonder whether it offers the full monty viz. its current lack of sequencing options.

Also, despite the allusion in the name of the Make Noise module and the controller description at the BugBrand site, neither of these interfaces actually respond to pressure. This might be semantic hair-splitting on my part but, as you can see from the Hubert demo video, there really is a different feel to playing a device with genuine pressure sensors.

Zauner are currently working on a second revision which will include two independent manual gate buttons and threshold level pots for the pressure-activated gates.