Brick 0 Brick

In my never-ending quest for musical weirdness, I came across an interesting site last night. AFAICT, this guy doesn’t make commercial products. He’s made something called the MIDIbrick, which is a sort of MIDI hardware prototype base. Using that as a starting point, he came up with this, which is, to make a long story short, a MIDI controller based upon the programming paradigm of the Roland TR606 drum machine.

Now, this is interesting on two fronts. First of all, in my opinion, the TR606 had one of the most elegant and easy-to-use programming methods for drums, like, ever. (Interesting, given that its sister unit, the TR303, has probably the most difficult and unusable interface ever.) Many devices have aped the programming interface, which speaks volumes about the usability. So, what this guy has made is a MIDI controller that (I assume) maps to the standard GM drum map, and allows you to sequence drum parts with an environment that is very comfortable for doing so.

The second thing is that it got me thinking. One could make the TR606 interface as a MIDI-capable plug-in, and have that same paradigm actually within the sequencer. I made something similar as a Logic environment back when I used Logic, and it worked pretty well. However, I no longer have Logic or the environment I made, so that does me little good. Steinberg has opened the SDK for building MIDI plug-ins, so there’s some potential. I had a look at the SDK, and it’s not very well documented, not like the VST SDK. So, I’m going to give it a whack, but I don’t have high hopes. I wasn’t able to build the example plug-in. (This, as I know from trying to develop for AU, is a dismaying thing, because you don’t even know where to start. Stranger in a Strange Land, and all that.)

But anyways, a cool idea. Unlikely it will ever come to anything on either front. I’ll drop the guy a line and see if he’s going to make more than one of these things.