We’ve released a tricked out Monome/MPC/Trigger Finger style multi touch interface to the public, available immediately to anyone who has created an free account with us.

A quick feature rundown:

• Pads Section
  • The pads output notes when pressed
  • The note range can be adjusted with the 2×3 grid of control buttons; the bottom two let you increase (NOTE RANGE +) or  decrease (NOTE RANGE -) the base note in the top left corner of the pad array.
  • The pads can either be a 4×4 or 8×8 grid, this can be toggled with the ‘GRID SIZE’ button.
  • With PAINT mode enabled, allowing you to drag your finger/cursor across the pad array, whichever pad you are over will trigger
  • With PAINT mode disabled, whichever pad you enabled first will remain enabled until you release it, regardless of where your finger/cursor is.
  • The Attack and Release of the velocity for the pads can be set in the farer section.
• Knobs Section;
  • The four knobs at the top are individually controllable and assignable as MIDI cc parameters.
  • Additionally, the four knobs can be assigned Attack and Release envelope values in the fader section such that triggering any pad will trigger the envelope for the knob.
• Faders Section:
  • The fader mode can be selected with the 2×3 control buttons
  • The MIDI OUT / default fader mode treats the faders as individual CC outputs that can be bound to a parameter in the target software/hardware.
  • The remaining fader modes are all related to envelopes for other parameters on the interface.
    • NOTE VEL ENV sets the envelope for note velocity output when a pad is pressed.
    • KNOB 1 – 4 ENV set the respective envelopes for the four knobs above the pads.
    • Each envelope consists of four parameters:
      • ATTACK determines how long a pad has to be held  for the envelope to reach peak value (so, in the context of a NOTE VEL envelope, how long the pad has to be held for the note to reach maximum loudness)
      • RELEASE determines how long it takes for the envelope to reach its minimum value after all pads have been released.
      • FLOOR determines the minimum output value for the envelope.
      • CEIL (ceiling) determines the maximum output value for the envelope.
• Disclaimer; if the envelope stuff is confusing, don’t worry, just try it out. and you’ll get the hang of it.
• Disclaimer II: REMEMBER to set the CEIL value to something higher than zero or your envelope won’t have any affect!
• Disclaimer III: The box in the top left corner is not an XY pad… yet…
• Disclaimer: IV: The fader in the top left corner is just a visual display of the note velocity output.

Some words on purpose and intent:

In the weeks and months following our teaser of Traxus Control Traktor for WebMIDI, we were flooded with requests to join the upcoming closed beta. Our hearts sank a bit because we knew our strict technology requirements for the beta would force us to politely decline many of these eager volunteers. As we toiled away with building a new site and our internal beta testing of Traxus Control Traktor we found it increasingly important to provide something that could at the very least hint towards the potential of WebMIDI to anyone with a capable browser. We wanted something that could better illustrate its proof of concept regardless of whether a user had a touchscreen device, access to a $300 piece of software, etc.

Basically, we wanted to release something that involved a bit less of a learning curve, and had the lowest possible barrier to entry when it came to required technology.

That said, anyone running an up to date version of  Google Chrome on a personal computer (WebMIDI has less support on mobile at the moment, sorry) should be able to fire up the interface and get MIDI I/O working with it.

The interface has full multi touch support but if you don’t have a touchscreen handy a mouse will trigger all of the components just fine; but obviously you can only interact with one item at a time.

Without further delay go ahead and check it out!