Andrew Claes

My Ph.D. is almost finished! Preparing the internal defense, scheduled on November 22nd.

Being a Ph.D. in the Arts, the thesis is presented as a book rather than an academic paper. The book is documenting my progress from a jazz musician with a passion for patching synthesizers, drumcomputers and generative systems in environments like NI Reaktor, Brainmodular Hollyhock, the Axoloti prototyping platform and more recently Bespoke Synth, to an aspiring coder and DIY engineer, using Arduino, ESP32 and developing PCB’s.

Very happy to see the book being printed and on its way to the jury!

I will publish the document as a pdf download on December 22.

Stay tuned!

New prototype!!

I finished another POC prototype. This time I upgraded a 1927 Lyon & Healy C-melody sax.

The cables are smaller, the octave system works better and I chose to omit the breathsensor completely.

This may seem an odd choice at first, even a step backwards, but I’m trying to make this thing as expressive as possible.

So what’s this about?

Well, if you control the ‘breath’ with an expression pedal, it’s a bit less precise for sure, but you can control the synth separately from what you are doing on the actual mouthpiece. This makes it actually more expressive than doubling breath from the mouthpiece.

Another practical thing is setup time when on the road.

Installing the pickup, connecting the preamp, splitting the signal… A lot of cables to deal with and all this before playing a gig is less inviting than just grabbing the sax, connecting the pedal and off you go! Sweet.

But hey, I’m not done yet. I will make a version with both piezo and breath controller options, but for now I will concentrate a bit more on some extra features.

Since the sax is a true MIDI controller now, I can map different sax keys to different functions.

I’m thinking about incorporating some Mortal Combat-like combos with the sax keys to unlock different functions.

Sending MIDI Program Changes from the sax with these specific fingerings as well as activating chords and polyphonic playing are on the to do list.

Still some work ahead, but I’m pretty excited this is starting to work really well!! To be continued…

The Hybrid Sax is approaching completion!!

Proud to present you world’s first Hybrid Sax Proof of Concept model.

This version features an analog envelope follower circuit.

The saxophone mouthpiece is equipped with the perfect sensor for picking up sound from the mouthpiece: Viga Music Tools Intramic.

The Intramic is read out through the envelope follower and now acts as a breath sensor.

As you can see in the video below, Hybrid Sax now transmits both note information from the keys as controller data from the mouthpiece.

Simply said, my sax is now also an EWI!!

Next steps:
– Design a simple breathsensor as a second mouthpiece:
With a second (digital) mouthpiece installed, you will be able to play the system in silent mode (no acoustic sound, only MIDI).
– Make an enclosure
– Update code and PCB
– Publish all makerfiles on GitHub
– Make an instructable for you to make it!

Bring me the octaves!

This version features a handy octave system. I used the capacitive touch inputs available on the ESP32. Touching the first metal sensor transposes the MIDI output one octave lower, Touching both sensor 1 and 2 simultaneously transposes 2 octaves down. Touching only the second sensor will transpose the data 3 octaves down.

The mechanical octave key is mapped with another Hall Effect sensor. This means, the natural range of the saxophone is fully mapped. The system will follow all actions on the instrument. Extended range of the instrument is mapped through the fingering chart of the corresponding ‘toptones’.

The extra touch octave keys shown below extend the lower range, effectively enabling 3 more octaves to be played from the instrument. This adds up to approximately 3 natural octaves and 3 MIDI octaves, putting the Hybrid Sax system in the Akai EWI ballpark of MIDI range.

Proof of Concept getting ready!

As promised, here is a video showing off the saxophone as a MIDI-controller.

All keys are read out through hall effect sensors, interpreted by a ESP32 microcontroller. MIDI-notes are send through both Bluetooth and DIN-connection.

In this instance, digital breath information is provided by the Photon breath controller. This is a prototype developed by IMOXPLUS and Chris Graham. The mouthpiece is not commercially available yet.

Simply put, I made an EWI out of my sax 🙂

Next steps: design octave keys and provide analog envelope follower system for use with a standard acoustic saxophone mouthpiece.

To be continued!