Okay I'm writing this lame-ass page and I'm like three margaritas to the wind today, but it's now or never. I've been meaning to write this frigging webpage *forever* so here it is at last. It's all ghetto-like, but hey, that's how these tap lights work too.

This page is about how to:

• Make your own physical sweaty interactive computer music interface
• While knowing very little about electronics
• And only spending a few dollars.

Previous research demonstrated that:

• Making your own MIDI interfaces is difficult and expensive.
• In fact you have to buy silly programmable EPROMs and shit.

However,

• Reaktor (and Live!) and other software respond to keypresses from your ordinary QWERTY keyboard
• It's easy to do shit with keyboards (kudos to Josh at the Zeum for turning me on to this trick.)

First you cannibalize a QWERTY keyboard so that you can close some of its key switches remotely. i.e. you pry it open and you solder wires to its key contact points so you can close the switch with two wires instead of with the actual key on the keyboard.

NOTE: You have to find the right keyboard. Because of how manufactureres lay out the circuit board, not all keyboards are made the same. Some can only hit 3 alphabet keys at the same time, some 4 or 5, some it depends on *which* keys you hit. I had to poke through three or four before I found one that let me hit 5 keys at once that Reaktor knew how to respond to.

Second you figure out some fun way to close those wires.Taplights were my favorite. I was wandering through a Long's Drug Store, and there they were, and there I was, and I was thinking .o O (Hmm... Those would make cool mute switches.) What do *you* think would make a cool interface?

One of the secrets to making your Dreams Come True is to learn about how Relays work. Relays are basically switch-switches. They have four essential wires. Two of them you wire up to the switch you want to close (in this example, a keybaord switch.) The other two, you connect to a power source which isn't always on. (For example, a taplight.) Or a vaccuum cleaner, or any appliance you can think of.

The idea is that a relay is an electromagnetic switch. You apply power to one side, and the switch does the job of connecting the two wires on the other side. The two sides are electrically isolated, so yo udon't have to worry about power from your vaccuum cleaner feeding into your computer keyboard and frying your laptop.

ANYTHING WHICH PRODUCES POWER CAN BE WIRED UP TO YOUR COMPUTER with a relay. This is a cheap-ass relay you see pictured on the right. It only cost 90 cents, but it also trips when you knock it or breathe on it or call it a silly name or something. I hate these realays. Go buy $2 relays.

This is what a bunch of relays looks like. To make things easy, I made sure that my taplights were "modular" that is that I could unplug them at will and replace them if they burnt out, etc.

Each taplight has two RCA style connectors coming off of it. One pair sends power to the taplight, the other power leaches the same power off of the lightbulb and sends it back to this control box (left) so it can trigger a relay switch and tell Reaktor to blast out some sick-ass fucking beats.

Here's what the whole kit looks like together. For ease of assembly/disassembly, the purple cord you see is what carries five pairs of keyboard contact switches (D, V, H, M and L in my case) to the black junction box. I used a five-pin din which looks just like MIDI, so it confuses the hell out of people.

The black box feeds each of the five taplights, and slurps power from each taplight to trigger a relay which closes a corresponding keyboard switch.

You can see how one taplight is plugged in with its two RCA plugs.

Okay, my margaritas are wearing off and I think I need a nap or something.

SUPER HUGE THANKS to nick winterhalter who helped me solder this whole beast together. I couldn't have done it without him (not without growing an extra set of hands anyway.)

If this drunken ramble makes no sense to you, but you'd still like to figure out how to escape the lame-ass boundaries of QWERTY laptop DJ'ing, feel free to email me at canton@gmail.com

Happy noising,

-canton

2008 Update

Okay finally getting around to posting some photos from 2003.

Here's the taplight setup as it was deployed when I toured with Ottmar Liebert + Lunanegra in 2002 and 2003. The taplights were used to trigger various percussion loops to accompany Ottmar and the rest of the band ( bass/keyboards + tabla/percussion ). Because the loops could be triggered live the band didn't have to play along with a click track and we were able to get a pretty organic groove going.