Project Pete
Synthesizer Control Pedal Board
Background
I'm a massive fan of synthesizers and in particular am big into monophonic synths like the Arp Odyssey and the Moog (Grandmother, Sub 37, Minimoog ... ). These are pretty old school analogue synths which are limited to being played one note at a time (or two in duophonic mode for some of them). Although that's pretty limiting, monosynths are good for a few reasons:
1. Being able to only play one note at a time forces you to keep things simple for bass or lead parts which usually sounds best. A good example of this is Gary Numan's 'Are Friend's Electric' which has an awesome lead played on a monosynth:
2. If playing a monosynth, you have an extra hand free which means you can change the sound while still playing. For example you could open and close the cut-off, add a bit of release or mod... In the video above the keyboard player is using his other hand to play chords on a polysynth underneath.
3. Monosynth patches usually sound 'fat' compared to polysynths - (although polysynths tend to have a monosynth mode and so can emulate this 'fatness') - there's also something cool about the sound of monosynths as you transition from one note to another which can be accentuated by the portmento or 'glide' parameter' giving the synth a sort of theramin like feel.
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In the early days polysynths which were capable of playing more than one note at a time were less readily available because they are technically much harder to build. Nowadays it is possible to get 8 voice polyphony or more on an analogue synth engine.
The problem with a polysynth is that if you are playing both hands you can no longer change the sound up as you play. When I got my first decent polysynth, I wanted to be able to do this with my feet. The closest thing on the market that could do this was a Behringer FCB1010. This is a pretty terrible product with a menu deep lcd interface and some horrible bugs which you have to fix by swapping the microcontroller. Also the FCB1010 only has two pedals to control a midi signal with. For that reason I built my own Synthesizer Control Pedal Board:
The pedals control some potentiometers which are monitored by an Arduino. The Arduino then converts these signals into a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) output which can control the synth. Here's my 16 voice analogue polysynth beast (Prophet Rev 2) being played in the following video with the Synthesizer Control Pedal Board: