The 3-D Trombone

When I was at the New Music Controllers workshop at CCRMA this summer, after I'd demoed my trombone controller and mentioned that I was interested in using a retractable string for a slide (based on a suggestion from Chris Graham), a CCRMA grad student named Michael Berger clued me into a very cool device - the GameTrak Controller.

The GameTrak is a pretty amazing little device. Think of a joystick, which can measure X and Y axis movements, then add a retractable cord that protrudes through the handle and can measure Z-axis displacement. There are actually two of these in each GameTrak, and the player wears a pair of gloves that attach to clips on the end of the Z-axis cords. Internally, there are 6 potentiometers that hook to a small board that does all the analog to digital conversion and appears as a USB HID device. Hooking one of these up to, say, Max/MSP or pd is super simple, and here are some cool things that have been done with GameTraks:

Game Trak Theory (A CCRMA performance)
Cop de Cap by Experimental Headbang Orchestra (Stanford)

Since the Wii pretty much destroyed the GameTrak in the gaming market, they're available very cheaply now - I think I now own 6, and I got them for $20 each.

Originally I was only interested in cannibalizing one for the z-axis retractable cord, to use that for the slide of my trombone. But once I got one of the GameTraks open, I thought "why limit the slide to linear motion? Why can't we build a trombone "slide" that operates in 3 dimensions?" And so the 3-D Trombone was born.

Opening up the GameTrak is very easy, and the spring/joystick mechanism for one-half of the device can easily be removed with just a small philips screwdriver. I remounted the assembly in a project box, which is a lot larger than I'd like it to be, but it's a prototype.

I built another breath controller using garden irrigation tubing and the same Freescale Pressure Sensor I used for the Gordophone. For overtone selection, I epoxied some momentary switches into piece of PVC tubing (in the Gordophone, these switches are in the joystick handle that is used to move the slide).

After wiring everything up, I made two changes to the Arduino sketch that does the sensor reading and MIDI event generation:

- Rescaled the "slide" motion limits, since the GameTra can measure about 6 feet of z-axis motion, but a trombone slide is only a couple of feet.
- Coded things so that the X and Y axis controllers produce MIDI continuous controller data on controllers number 16 and 17.

Finally, I put together a patch and an effect in Logic, as follows:

- A simple sine wave instrument using the ES2 synth. The breath controller is mapped to the oscillator amplitude.
- The EVOC 20 TrackOscillator Filter. I used Logic's "Learn" mode to set things up so that the slide's X axis motion controls the Formant Shift, and the Y axis motion controls the LFO intensity. I set the LFO frequency at 100 Hz so it really distorts the sound (I really lean into that distortion at around 0:52 and 1:02).

I made the X and Y axis controls very non-subtle, so I could tell when they were working. This video shows the whole thing in action.




One thing that's very tricky is maintaining a constant slide position on the Z-axis while moving around the X and Y axes. While playing a traditional trombone, one can move around, but the player's body position relative the the instrument remains constant. With the 3-D Trombone, all that changes, and it (so far) seems like a radically different experience. More exprimentation is due.