Mario is a good friend of Gearjunkies. We have posted already more of his great work he does on custom specialised software controllers. His latest work is a controller for the u-he Diva software synthesizer. Inside the controller there are 2 Doepfer USB64 Midi Interfaces, one special Wheel Electronic for Pitch and Mod Wheel and the MKE Electronic for the 4 octave Fatar keyboard with velocity. The DIVA Controller has about 90 knobs and 25 switches.
Mario Jurisch (the creator) explains:
The difficulty was, how to realize the different modules of the Oscillators, Filters and Envelopes. If the controller would have its own knob,for each parameter then the controller would have the dimension of a Moog Modular.
The advantage is, that the same parameters on different modules, e.g. Oscialltor 2 Detune, have the same midi cc and only the module you choose in the GUI, is active. So i need only one Detune 2 Knob for all modules, if there is a detune knob.
The Dual VCO Module is the only module witch have switches for the waveforms instead of Knobs. So all switches have their own midi cc.
On the Top of the controller there are 5 knobs. With these knobs i can switch between the different modules. To know witch knob is for witch parameter (module) i use colored labels.
For example: The Tripple VCO is white, the Dual VCO is yellow, the DCO red and the Dual VCO Eco is blue. The same with the different filter and envelope modules. So, some knobs have only label with one color, other have multi color labels.
The controller has a width of about 90 cm and a height of about 30 cm. The weight is about 9 kg.