I designed this MIDI controller for my friend, who uses the Looper device in Ableton Live extensively. It’s a grid of 12 light-up buttons designed to control four tracks:
The yellow buttons mute and unmute The red buttons arm the tracks The blue buttons start and stop record/overdub on the Looper device The V1 LoopBox I designed the first version several years ago. It relied on a Teensy dev board.
What’s cooler than a guitar that lights up when you play it? Nothing.
Hardware This whole idea was inspired by Adafruit’s Neopixel LED strips. These are chains of RGB LEDs on a flexible PCB, with each light individually addressable.
The lights are controlled by an Adafruit Trinket M0, which is an absolutely amazing tiny microcontroller board.
The guitar is an old Squier Stratocaster. It’s my first guitar, which I bought way back when I was in high school.
This is a tiny analog audio mixer with two stereo 1/8" inputs.
This is the first hardware project I was really satisfied with. It fits nicely in its enclosure, looks relatively tidy, runs forever on its battery, and does the thing it’s supposed to do.
I’m a big fan of tiny music gadgets: Korg’s Volca series, Pocket Operators, OP-1, etc. The point of this tiny mixer is to let me play a couple of them together, without carrying a bunch of extra stuff around.