I love the Moog ONE.
Having worked with it for a couple of years now, I've found a lot to like in the concept and realization of this amazing instrument. It has an incredible feature set, with a deep and complex group of modules and routing capabilities, and one of the most elegant user interfaces I've ever had the pleasure of using.
Its sophisticated UI is the perfect way to harness the ONE's capabilities without needing a huge learning curve to master it. There's tons of knobs, and a minimum of menu diving to easily and quickly accomplish just about anything you can dream up.
Now, that being said...
One thing that I didn't bond with were the pitch and mod wheels.
For my taste, they just seemed out of place with the rest of the instrument. They're made of metal, and are all smooth surfaces. The mass of the metal made them feel sluggish, and the smooth surfaces made them slippery and difficult for me to control accurately. I tried applying some self-stick rubber dots to the wheel divots, and that did help improve the grip, but the weight still made them difficult to control, and they also tended to wobble on axis. I used some thin kapton tape to better shim the fit of the wheels to the potentiometers, but even after all this work I was already starting to think that there must be a better way for me to use the left hand controller.
Years ago, I created a custom joystick controller for my brand-new Prophet 5. It was a fairly ugly looking stand-alone box that plugged into a connector I added to the back of the P5, and was mounted on the keyboard stand beside the wheels on the unit.
It also housed some custom-designed electronics, including a dedicated LFO for vibrato, which freed up the P5 LFO for PWM and other modulation duties, and a sample and hold that could be assigned through the P5 poly mod and used either a noise source or the LFO waveshapes as the sample input.
I found a nice 4-axis joystick that was built for an R/C airplane transmitter by Kraft, and with a bit of work, design and planning, and some questionable manufacturing skills, my project came to life.
After a few upgrades and revisions to the original circuitry, I had an advanced (for the time) accessory that really worked well for me and meshed very well with my vision for using the synth, greatly expanding its capabilities for personal expression.
Now, many years later, it's no longer just an accessory, but a crucial and organic part of the instrument.
As I continued to program and become more familiar with the capabilities of the ONE, it became apparent to me that I still wasn't being as expressive as I wanted with the left hand controller wheels. After several months of using the instrument this way, the concept of creating an updated joystick controller to replace them began to look more and more attractive.
I thought quite a bit about what I would want in an updated controller like this for a long time, and realized that given the much deeper Moog ONE interface capabilities, and unknown nature of the hardware involved (Moog won't release schematics, unfortunately) that this had the potential to become a huge and complicated project. Finally, I decided to take the leap, and spent the next several months examining and measuring the various wheel and CV interfaces, reverse engineered the circuitry that was involved, and made a few different proto boards to try out various hardware interface designs. When I was happy with my results, I took a deep breath, dug in and started work in earnest to create what I now refer to as the Moog ONE-J (patent pretending, all rights reserved, all rites preserved, all right!!).
The ONE has a wealth of CV input and output jacks on the back. There are inputs for two CV expression pedals, two more dedicated CV inputs, and four CV outputs. These CV inputs are all assignable through the extensive mod matrix and are programmable per preset. The CV outputs are globally assigned, and these assignments can be saved per user space.
This made the idea of a multiaxis controller even more attractive, as it could be be completely and easily remodeled/reimagined with each preset change (or new user space), if so desired.
As it turns out, each of the jacks on the back had an unused normalling connection, so the joystick axes could easily interconnect through them, gaining access for all the functions through the mod matrix. If any jack actually had a CV cable plugged in, that would automatically overide that particular joystick function, truly giving me the best of both worlds.
The ONE mod matrix allows up to 20 programmable connections per each of the 3 synth layers. Each modulation source can connect to multiple destinations with adjustable independent scaling for each one, and each destination can accommodate multiple sources, so this would allow for each programmable axis of the joystick to be incredibly powerful and expressive.
I found a nice 5-axis joystick suitable for my purposes, and began to design the circuitry to allow it to interface with the ONE. A multi-talented friend designed and 3D printed a cool bezel for it, and a few coats of black crinkle paint gave it a sleek retro appearance and texture, which looked at home with the rest of the left hand controller hardware.
I used a Dremel cutting wheel to carefully cut out the wheels from the LHC box, leaving the perfect space to mount the joystick and bezel.
A few miniature switches, an additional potentiometer, and an indicator LED were added to expand the controller assignment capabilities on the fly. More on this in a bit.
The electronics interface for the controller was designed to allow for complete and accurate adjustment of each axis so it could seamlessly interface to the ONE, and have the same scaling attributes as the the other controllers such as the keyboard, LFOs, envelope generators, etc. (the modulation matrix for the Moog is designed and scaled so that a modulation amount of 10% produces a change of one octave).
I felt that this was especially important, as I wanted it to organically integrate with the instrument during programming and performance.
I also designed the interface module to connect to the instrument through a series of multi-pin connectors, so it would be easy to remove for development and modifications as the project advanced. This required a bit more work and planning, but more than paid for itself over the course of development and fine-tuning.
I used some groovy 70's rainbow colored ribbon cable to make the interconnect cabling, because that's how electronic music looks, right?
I also used my labelmaker to print out tiny white-on-clear labels for the trimmers to make tuning and calibration easier.
The module was built on a piece of perfboard (with a handy ground plane on one side, perfect for these types of projects) using a combination of through-hole and surface mount parts. All trimmers were precision 25-turn types which I had recently stocked up on cheaply through eBay. I used thin wire wrap type wire to make all the interconnects between components.
This type of construction makes it easy to make changes and modifications as needed.
One particular advantage of the original wheels was that the mod wheel typically isn't spring loaded and could be set to a particular position, like a standard potentiometer. This would allow you to set a continuous amount for vibrato, or create a set amount of PWM or other modulation that would add animation to sounds which could be very useful. The joystick axis for the mod wheel input (twist left) was spring loaded, so I decided to add a small potentiometer to the bottom of the LHC to allow me to duplicate this function. I used one with a pull switch so that it could be activated when pulled up, and the function would revert to the joystick when it was pushed down. This also allowed me to preset a mod amount that could be activated on demand if wanted.
Groovy.
The system design was built around a 5 axis joystick. I found this one on eBay for a very reasonable price.
I liked it so much that I ordered a few more for other projects, and as spares if needed. I have seen them available with 5K ohm and 10K ohm potentiometers. I got a few of each, and built this project using a 10K ohm example. All of the axes are spring loaded, return to center types, and it looks like the forward/back and side/side axes can be (somewhat easily) modified to remove the spring loading so the stick will stay where you set it. This would make a very nice Pink Floyd-style Azimuth Coordinator (seen below) for panning sounds in a quadraphonic setup.
So, how do I use it (one might ask)?
The forward and back motion is assigned to pitch bend. The incredibly deep implementation of the ONE allows you to program different bend ranges for bend up and bend down, allows reversing their function, applying a different bend range for each oscillator, different ranges for each of the 3 synth layers, and also makes the bend CV available as a source in the mod matrix, so it can be used for many other purposes as well. This should give you just a taste of the depth and complexity available to an imaginative programmer. There's more; lots more.
Side to side motion of the joystick in my system is normalled to the expression pedal 2 CV input (the expression pedal 1 input in my system is always occupied by an actual expression pedal, usually a custom-modified Vintage Moog or Ernie Ball). It's typically assigned to control various filter cutoff functionalities (and there are many to choose from) but is also sometimes used to bend one or more oscillators in the sync mode to create those familiar timbre sweeps. Of course, it can also be assigned in many other ways, but for my uses it's typically used to shape and modulate the overall timbre of the sound I'm controlling.
Twisting the joystick to the left creates a CV that is assigned to replace the mod wheel, and it's also used in conjunction with the push/pull switch knob mentioned earlier. Like a typical mod wheel, it's often assigned to create vibrato or tremolo. The mod wheel is also available as a mod matrix source and freely reassignable if desired. Twisting the joystick to the right creates a CV that can be assigned through the CV1 input. I often use this as an alternate vibrato, like using a unipolar square wave for a trill effect, or even sample and hold for a completely different type of modulation. Another great use is to access an audio rate LFO to add "growl" to a sound.
The 5th axis (5th dimension!) is a momentary push button, located on top of the controller.
I created circuitry with a small toggle switch mounted beside the joystick to allow it to be a momentary control, or latching (push on/push off). An added red LED on the LHC panel lights when the control is active. Another small toggle switch allows the CV created by the push button control to be routed to the CV2 input or alternately to the sustain pedal jack to allow for chord hold effects. Both of these switches are the short bat versions which are big enough to switch easily, but small enough to resist getting accidentally smacked into and broken. I used a nice dress nut for both switches, which I feel gives them a more pro appearance.
I once again used the labelmaker to create a few small white-on-clear labels to identify these added controls. As I've mentioned in previous blogs, trimming the labels as closely as possible (along with proper font and size selection) makes the overall effect look much less like a label, and more like an organic part of the unit.
I call this the "anything can happen" control. Its superpower that makes it so valuable is that it can create subtle or dramatic changes that can happen immediately, and without any undue noise or glitches (as can sometimes happen when changing presets). It can be programmed to completely retune the oscillators on command during a solo, bring in other layered sounds, supercharge certain settings for a pinpoint emphasis, make everything momentarily pan around furiously, and probably a million more things you and I have not dreamed of. Yet.
The LHC panel was designed so that it could be opened to allow easy access to my module for tuning and calibration once everything was installed in the system, and the unit was turned on and thoroughly warmed up.
As you might imagine, having all of this control immediately available under your left hand as you play can add a tremendous amount of expression and nuance to your playing, especially while soloing. You also have quick easy access to the X/Y touchpad, and just in front of the joystick are the octave transpose buttons, which can be easily accessed using the index and middle fingers while still maintaining control of the joystick.
The ONE has the capability to independently save your mod matrix settings as its own preset, and I've found this to be invaluable to me. I can name my work and save it so that I can add a particular setup to any new preset I'm working on in an instant. There's even a section for adding detailed notes so I don't forget any important/arcane details about adjusting things. This is especially important because this feature saves the modulation routings, but not any settings of the modules that are used, so it helps to make notes of anything that's important to recreate the desired effect. Once a modulation preset is saved, it can be easily added into a new preset you're working on, much like adding a favorite spice to a stew.
The path to making something like this truly expressive involves envisioning and designing a layout on the various axes that complements your particular workflow and thought processes as you play, and then practicing with it while fine-tuning the ranges and sensitivities to fit your style. This can be an ongoing process; it certainly has been for me (pretty much every time I sit down to carve a sound).
However, the added capabilities and depth of expression has made the amount of work involved more than worth it to me. I've gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of the incredible work that the team at Moog put into creating this vastly programmable instrument platform, and I've had the satisfaction of adding my own creative touches to help mold it to my particular style of expression.
I'm more than happy with the results.
For those readers who might be interested, I'm providing a link for a short time here to a small collection of presets from my personal library, as a gift to my fellow Moog ONE enthusiasts.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e25yrfvznhc8xs4/SYNTHGUY%20GIFT%20LIBRARY.zip?dl=0
Be sure that your unit has the latest firmware, which is 1.4 as of this writing. Some of the presets will require this to function properly.
Enjoy!
