Posted on Toolband today was a link to Vince De Franco‘s latest project, the Mandala Synapse. I’m no expert, but it looks like a gizmo that allows you to connect a range of musical devices (mainly percussion) to a PC with low latency.
Vince is looking for people to fund the device using the popular Kickstarter service. By pledging certain amounts, you can get a range of goodies, from stickets, t-shirts, signed Danny Carey drum sticks and even the device itself. Sadly, unlike Josh Freese they’re not offering a drive in Danny’s Lamborghini on mushrooms reward.
Here’s a video which hopefully explains the project better than me:
If this sounds like a good idea, then get on board and pledge some money.
There doesn’t seem to anything new or exciting about this. There’s literally dozens of midi interfaces on the market that accommodate electronic percussion pads and triggers. And pledging money…what the fuck?
An interesting question, however I don’t know enough about this kind of hardware to comment.
As far as pledging is concerned – it’s just a way to see if there is enough interest in the market to make the product worthwhile. Not so hard to understand.
So i thought I’d ask the question and got a quick response:
Looks cool to me. I’ve long been interested in getting at least one Mandala pad for no other reason than I like to make noises. Nice to know that IF i got this gizmo too, I could use my controller pedal too. Hopefully the controller pedal would be allowed to manipulate more than just the volume of the device.
That said I’m not planning on buying either thing any time soon.
Too many too’s in that third sentence. Too early in the morning for me to be posting, it is.
To be truthful I’ll take two, too!