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Super Fun Instrument Design

By Nathan Lively

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In this episode of Sound Design Live Podcast I talk with electronic instrument designer, musician, and controllerism evangelist Moldover about music instrument technology, his super cool circuit board CD, and why the hell MIDI still exists.

Big thanks to video director Jon Lowe!

Details from the podcast:

  1. Instruments, Circuit board CD on Hack-a-Day
  2. Homepage, Lovetech, Controllerism, Robotspeak
  3. MIDI on Wikipedia

Related Post: Mark Mosher on Music Instrument Technology, Electronic Music, & Ableton Live

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Comments

  1. art says

    March 24, 2012 at 23:48

    very best .

    Reply
  2. Moldover says

    April 5, 2012 at 14:54

    I just finished watching the video and listening to the audio all the way through. Oustanding! You’ve done a wonderful job of encapsulating all the different work I’ve done in recent years. I really appreciate your enthusiastic and thoughtful approach to interviewing. I think you did a great job with the editing too- trimming it to under 20-minutes but keeping all the info in there. Well done!

    If any of you Sound Design Live fans care to check out my more recent work, I have a bunch of new videos up at https://moldover.com

    Peace,
    (!)oldover

    Reply
    • admin says

      April 7, 2012 at 16:20

      Thanks Moldover! It was really fun checking out your instruments.
      This was my first time using the new version of Final Cut, so I’m glad it looked good to your eyes.

      Reply
  3. Lucas says

    April 17, 2012 at 16:26

    Wow, really fun to watch!

    Such clean product design, does Moldover fabricate and program everything himself?

    The MIDI interface discussion was interesting as well. Such a fixed format is strange when compared to other changes in technology (like the change from CDs mentioned). I can’t think of many other technologies as old and still as widely used as MIDI.

    Reply
    • admin says

      April 17, 2012 at 18:11

      I don’t think he smelts the metal, but we’ll have to ask him. 😉
      On top of being old, MIDI is slow and bulky. Two of the five signal cables don’t even do anything! I suppose it was designed with the idea to be expandable.
      It’s interesting to me when a new $100,000 piece of hardware comes out and it has all the pro interface formats and then… MIDI, just to round things out.

      Reply
  4. Moldover says

    April 17, 2012 at 21:14

    Our conversation about MIDI prompted me to research the topic a bit. Here is a great white paper published by the MIDI Manufacturers Association addressing a lot of the accusations that MIDI is “slow”, “low resolution” etc. https://www.midi.org/aboutmidi/midi-osc.php

    MIDI is just a protocol- a predefined and limited set of messages used for communication. As that paper outlines, pretty much all of the shortcomings of its old hardware interface (the 5-pin DIN system) have been overcome via new interfaces like USB and Ethernet, and the protocol itself works really well for representing musical gestures. ASCII is here to stay as long as we use written language in our computers and like it or not, MIDI will probably stick around as long as we use music in our machines 😉

    ( ! )

    P.S. Livid Instruments, Visionary Instruments, and Front Panel Express help me fabricate parts for the Mojo.

    Reply
  5. pcb says

    May 22, 2012 at 12:36

    Wow amazing excellent piece of work very inspiring and motivating!Thanks for this inspiring video posting..

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Moldover talks Mojo, JamBoxes, MIDI, more | Controllerism.com says:
    March 10, 2012 at 13:13

    […] Lively about The Mojo, controllerism, circuit board CDs, JamBoxes, and why we still use MIDI.  Via Sound Design Live This entry was posted in Info and tagged Moldover hardware by moldover. Bookmark the […]

    Reply
  2. Mark Mosher on Music Instrument Technology, Electronic Music, & Ableton Live says:
    June 4, 2013 at 13:09

    […] Related Post: Moldover on Music Instrument Technology, Design, & Controllerism […]

    Reply
  3. Introducing The Guitar Wing says:
    April 15, 2015 at 09:24

    […] the last three years Moldover has been blending his controllerism skills with his life-long love of Guitar. I […]

    Reply
  4. Control Ableton Live from your Guitar with Wireless Bluetooth says:
    April 15, 2015 at 09:30

    […] the last three years Moldover has been blending his controllerism skills with his life-long love of Guitar. I […]

    Reply

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