Stick your gear together with midiglue converter, sequencer and effects unit

18 Aug 2018 by Robin Vincent | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Sigboost midiglue · Source: Sigboost

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A couple of days left on this remarkable Kickstarter that almost slipped past unnoticed. Or at least unnoticed by me as they have currently raised four times their goal so plenty of people have picked up on it. Let’s get stuck in some midiglue.

midiglue

midiglue is a neat programmable MIDI/CV controller, sequencer and MIDI effects unit. It’s designed to convert between everything, sync between everything and kick out some MIDI effects to boot. It has connections for MIDI, USB-MIDI and CV/Gate and can send all of those in whatever direction you choose. So take your USB MIDI controller into your Eurorack, or bring your modular LFO into your MIDI synthesizer. There’s even a footswitch input so you can start kicking your analogue kick drum module. There are all sorts of clever merging and splitting, combining of parameters to single CC numbers and all sorts of shinanigans possible within this box.

Sigboost midiglue · Source: Sigboost

It will also kick out a number of MIDI effects like note delay, pitch shifting and quantizing. It will generate LFOs, chords, arpeggiators and sequences. These can be tweaked and more can be programmed via a software editor. It has a modular patching feel to it with building blocks and patch cables.

Sigboost midiglue · Source: Sigboost

Developing

It’s still in the prototype stage but they say most of the functionality is there. The box design may well go through a number of changes before it’s ready for release.

midiglue was created by a bunch of Tokyo University Students headed up by Kai Aoki and it looks like this is going to be a huge success for them. It came out of a project called “Sigboost” where they designed an FPGA programmable digital instrument.

£117 will get you an Early Bird midiglue box which they expect to deliver in March next year. So this is more than simply taking preorders (which Kickstarter seems to be all about these days) it’s about helping them develop a product and bring it to market.