Mine: roll-your-own MIDI controller now on Kickstarter
Special Waves Mine and Mine S · Source: http://special-waves.com/
Special Waves Mine and Mine S · Source: http://special-waves.com/
We first saw the Mine modular MIDI controller from Special Waves back in November. In essense, it’s a tray into which you can place various knob, slider and button modules to create your own customised MIDI controller. It’s now made it to Kickstarter in order to raise a shed load of money to put it into production.
Mine, all mine
They are after €150,000 – that’s one hundred and fifty thousand Euros! That seems a lot to me. I think it’s a really cool product, looks great, interesting technology and ultimately useful. But how useful and to how many people? There are loads of half decent and cheap MIDI controllers out there – Novation Launchpads, Behringer X-Touch, Akai MPD or APC40 – there’s plenty to choose from. And although they may not be perfect for what you’re after do you really need to spend €420 for an “Early bird” Mine to slightly re-arrange the layout?
Let’s assume that you do. In that case, Mine looks amazing. The design of the tray is excellent, I love the wooden details and the approach to high-quality materials. You really could build an interface that matches exactly what you want to be controlling – why settle for a controller that doesn’t quite meet your needs?
Along with the pad, buttons, encoder, pt and slider they also hope to bring along LED display blocks, joypads, touch strips, motorised faders, XY pads and jog wheels. Actually, that does sound quite exciting. I get the feeling that you’d really need two as an 8×8 box isn’t really all that much. You’d also have to think about getting extra bags of controls in case you want to reconfigure. It can get expensive really quickly.
So, I think it looks fabulous, could be really useful, but I remain unconvinced that they are going to find enough people to hit their €150,000 goal. But I do wish them all the best with it and if it’s interesting to you then go and support them, even with a small donation. They have a €25 t-shirt you could opt for.
The Mine (8×8) and Mine S (4×8) are available for pre-order via the Kickstarter campaign. More information on the Special Waves website.
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