Photo courtesy of Josh Boughey

November 26th, 2008 – Josh Boughey has released the Stribe1, a touch sensitive, LED-metered “fader”. While your first inclination might be to use this as a cool fader befitting of your next club set, Josh points out on CreateDigitalMusic that while it resembles a fader, it’s in fact a controller that can be programmed to do whatever you want.

While the LEDs may light bottom-up in this set up, I’m sure that it could be programmed to only light up where you touch. The possibilites of this controller have my brain in a tizzy. MIDI trigger with blending of samples between touch points, jog dial through samples or songs, or even reactive instrument. For some reason I’m imagining an instrument where the controller always wants to light up it’s whole length which is a certain note, but “pushing down” the light causes the pitch to bend. Think of this in context of controlling a record when DJing. Pushing down essentially puts pressure on the record slowing it down and changing its pitch. Wow, seriously, someone make this and show me! I sadly lack the technical skill to do it myself.