OddBall – The bouncy ball turned MIDI controller
OddBall is the creative culmination of efforts by an award-winning graphic designer alongside a musician/mechanical engineer.
“We wanted to give everybody the opportunity to create music the same way musicians do. With OddBall, making beats is easy, intuitive, fun and can be done wherever you are.” said the OddBall creators. Their objective is to create fun, new and interactive ways of making music and the result is a device so easy to use, literally anyone can have fun with it.
OddBall is essentially a drum machine crammed into a bouncy ball, well more of a MIDI controller, which means it’s not limited to triggering drums, but just imagine the endless randomization possibilities you can achieve with this guy. Imagine for a second, a live set with some parameters like filters or effects linked to the Ball, being able to pass it around the audience for them to interactive with the sound, it present entirely new ways of jamming.
How does it actually work?
OddBall uses Bluetooth to transmit MIDI data from the ball to your system, whether you’re using a DAW or the mobile app that’s developed specifically for OddBall, there’s a variety of capabilities in terms of the different types of gestures you can use to control the sound.
The system is not yet available to the public, the creators are running a kickstarter campaign – donating USD $65 (Around R900) to the cause will get you one OddBall on launch, USD $151 (Around R2000) will get you two and USD $222 (Around R3000) will get you a pack of three.
So here’s my idea, let’s buy a truck-load of these, hook them up to random synth parameters in a DAW, and let them loose in a wind-tunnel and hit record!
To find out more about the project, check out the creator’s website.
To contribute towards the Kickstarter campaign, check out.
