MIDI modification box?

[Taylor]

I've just built Thomas Henry's GM Voice project, and am already thinking about how to augment it.

Specifically, I'd like to have a box that receives the MIDI messages from my keyboard, mangles them in various ways, and then sends them on to my GM Voice unit. I used to do this kind of stuff using modular computer environments like Plogue Bidule, PureData, Max/MSP, etc. but I am aiming to get out of using computers for music (even if it means building smaller computers to do the job...).

Some features I'd like this box to have would be:

1) the ability to remap keys to microtonal scales. This would mean splitting each note in the octave (for simplicity I'm willing to keep 12 notes per octave, just retune them), then applying different pitch bend amounts to each key. I'd just want this setup as a few presets to switch between various just intonations, some quartertone things, Werckmeister, etc.

An extension of this which I may find to be too complex would be to allow more than 12 notes per octave, in which case there would need to be individual pitch bend for every single note of the keyboard instead of just 12 different pitch bends.

2) Adding multiple delays. Multi-tap delays are fun, and MIDI delays are different from audio delays in that you can tweak the time without getting pitch bends. It's also cool because you can set up 20 delays so that the note repeats 20 times and then cuts off abruptly or even gets louder before dying out, without the "babysitting" necessary when you're trying to do this kind of thing with audio delays (have to ride the feedback knob to keep from melting amps and eardrums).

3) Allowing to transpose the delays. To get arpeggiating repeats.

So, I'm extremely new to microcontrollers and am unsure whether there already exists a project like this, or if not, what would be an ideal platform to do this?


Edit: whoa, posted this 8 minutes ago, and I'm searching on Google for "microcontroller midi note remapper" and this thread was one of the top hits! I think Google raises hits from your cache, but still.

[Dan Lavin]

You might be able to do something with Midibox. It seems like you can do just about anything with them given time and patience.....neither of which I seem to have.

[Taylor]

Yeah, I was looking there, in fact they do have a MIDI delay... thing:

http://www.midibox.org/forum/forums.html?topic=587.0

I must admit that I'm baffled about the real-world implementation of MIDIBox stuff. But I think you're right, I just need to put some time in learning about it.

[davebr]