I became fascinated with touchsurface controlled electronic instruments since I installed Mugician on my iPad around 2010. Its interface felt like one that was specifically designed for touchscreen playing, unlike the many piano key based iPad synths. I found myself jamming away for hours, even though I'm not a good guitar or keyboard player. And this program didn't even have ability to set a scale. Neither was it faux-pressure sensitive (in its App Store build at least).
Rob Fielding's Mugician: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rVpuSj75rI
Around the same time prototypes of Roger Linn's LinnStrument appeared on videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqT25dlf1OQ
Strikingly similar, with the addition of real pressure sensitivity.
Mugician and Morphwiz' fret snapping AKA pitch rounding
Mugician can be configured to be either fretted or fretless, but what makes it fundamentally different from these acoustic standards is that it can be configured to act as a semi-fretted instrument. Rob explains this best:
-http://rrr00bb.blogspot.nl/2010/08/mugi ... phics.htmlPitch Rounding / Optional Frets - This was a Jordan Rudess suggestion that everyone had been trying to beat into me from day one. In fact, it's a lot like the pitch handling in his Morphwiz program - which you no doubt went out and bought! Mugician started out as a 100% fretless instrument, to make it a viable "microtonal" instrument. It had no frets, and it was up to you to play in tune, like a violinist. Obviously, that makes Mugician tough to learn, and the iPad's accuracy just isn't enough for this to be viable. So, at 0% play is completely fretless (good luck!) and no frets are drawn between the notes. Up to 25%, it snaps to the closest diatonic note if you are within a quartertone of it. It draws the frets green at this setting. It won't round if you move after initial hit, and if you completely miss the diatonic, it will just play exactly what you did. This allows you to play middle-eastern style quartertone scales more or less correctly - simplifying it by snapping non-quartertone pitches to the 12-tone equal temperment scale as a compromise approximation. Above 25% it's fretted, but how far the slider is determines how quickly it drifts to the closest diatonic. This greatly affects your ability to bend notes or to sound like you are moving your finger across frets.
This is one of the main reasons why this instrument is expressive and intuitive: it bridges the expressiveness of fretless instruments (gliding, microtonality, vibratos, etc.) without making it too hard to hit the right note. This kind of bending and gliding feels much more natural to me than using a separate ribbon controller or mod wheel.
Semi-fretted push?
So I was just thinking, what if a transparent plastic board is placed over all the Push frets/pads to turn it into one big surface, and a MaxForLive patch is used to measure where the pressure is applied (either on or in between the pads)...
Just throwing it in the group, I wonder if this is inspiring to anyone....
cheers!