diy soft/hard synth

[signboy]

I had an idea this morning. Instead of drooling over hardware synths with *gasp* Polyphony!, for retarded amounts of money, why not build a fantastic softsynth in a cheap but dedicated pc package? I'm thinking it would function more or less like the Receptor but won't cost as much.
Start with a basic pc setup that has only what's necessary to run a standalone vst synth like Massive. Throw the whole package into a nifty aluminum case or something, and put a touchscreen on top. set it so when you turn on the power button it fires up your favourite synth in fullscreen.
Any chance anyone has tried anything like this and has some wisdom?
Any chance that one of the half million computer nerds here has some advice or recommendations?


[edit]okay, so touch screens are expensive as hell. maybe just an overlay would do the job.[/edit]

[Billy's Little Trip]

When you say, "fires up with your favorite synth full screen", do you mean the actual ivories that are touch sensitive, like a virtual piano?

[signboy]

No, I'm thinking of having the box be a touchscreen with this kind of screen:

And basic ins/outs on the box, with MIDI hardwired in, so a keytar or something would be used as the controller.

[Märk]

I'd try to find a tablet PC on ebay for cheap, that takes care of size and touchscreen right off the bat. I believe most tablets have PCMCIA slots, so you could get a cardbus midi interface and not have junk hanging off a USB port. As for starting up as the softsynth in full screen, you can edit the registry key "Shell" at [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] to whatever program you want, and that will load instead of explorer.exe.

Just a few ideas.

[signboy]

Cool idea for the shell mod Mark, I was just going to put stuff in the startup folder. As for the tablet, I'm actually using one right now. The never stylus comes out of the stupid little slot because it annoys the HELL out of me that I can't just stick my finger on it. I think the lack of "hands on" is what keeps me using my electribe when I have all of Reason right there. The touch overlays are pretty cheap anyway, and that's all the money I'll need to put into this project. I'm trying to keep it fairly budget oriented.

[fluffy]

There are several different kinds of touchscreens used on various tablet PCs. Some use an active stylus (such as a Wacom) and those can't be used with a finger. Some use a passive stylus (i.e. a chunk of plastic) and those can be finger-activated, but they tend to suck. Lately, more devices have been using capacitive screens, which allow multiple simultaneous touches (although Apple has a lot of patents on the more useful things you can do with that), and which can use a passive stylus although the stylus has to be a little more complicated than a chunk of plastic.

Anyway, yeah, PC-as-softsynth-slave is a perfectly reasonable thing. Gigastudio was actually intended to be used in that way (which is one of the reasons they took so long in supporting the Mac, the idea being that to use Gigastudio you'd be building a dedicated box for it anyway so why not just build a cheap Windows PC for it).

[signboy]

Seriously, thanks for the moral support, Fluffy. The amount of friends that think I'm retarded (for wanting to do this) is absurd. After monkeying with some ideas, I think I'm going to go with the Massive synth as it's more graphically based, and has bigger knobs for fat, drunk fingers. The processor is going to cost about $100, and I already have the motherboard and midi peripherals. Now the bulk of the cost is dependent on the monitor and/or touchscreen.

Has anybody had any experience, good or bad, with the generic overlays?
The $200 price tag is tempting, but I'll fork out some more if it's just going to suck and need upgrading anyway.

[fluffy]

Oh also several of Korg's newer synthesizers are actually just little Linux boxes stuffed into a synth case.