After playing with Arduino microcontrollers I suppose it was inevitable that I turned to it’s larger brother the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is more of a conventional computer but in a small form factor – in a box about the same size as the Arduino in fact.
This project was initiated by a thought I had when doing the large synth gig in Catford last month. In that gig I was using the laptop to drive one soft-synth, but without that it was really just there being a mixer – audio and MIDI – so I wondered if it was possible to do without the laptop at all. I have a hardware mixer so that can mix the audio output of the synths, but my large keyboard only has a USB socket for its MIDI output and power, and not a 5 pin DIN socket. So I thought of using a small computer to all the MIDI routing – automatically.
This turned out to be relatively easy for me, as an experienced C programmer. I got a Raspberry Pi starter kit, investigated the Linux ALSA (sound and MIDI) library calls and quite quickly wrote a small program that would route keyboard presses from a USB/MIDI keyboard to an attached synth. I also added a feature to send messages on MIDI channel 16 to a ‘Bass Synth’ (the Little Phatty or Minitaur) and also to forward any MIDI sync messages to all of the synths attached on the USB so that when Stuart has his Beatstep running in full Tangerine Dream mode all of the synths can run together.
Another feature is for it to behave as a TouchOSC->MIDI Bridge so that I can use the tablet to control the Blofeld as I did in this post. Some more work is need here to set the Raspberry Pi to run on a wireless network without a router as would be the case in a gig situation but that is in hand. I also intend to add a simple arpeggiator to the bass synth driver code.
So now I have a box smaller than many effects pedals that can do most of the work of a laptop at a synth gig. I plan to road-test this at a CSMA gig in Leeds in August.
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Raspberry Pi 3 Model B have integrated WiFi and Bluetooth.