Gliss Developer Diaries

Again, a huge thank you to everyone who has backed us so far! We’ve passed the 200% mark on the campaign and we’re very close to the production-ready version of the hardware. On the firmware side of things, we have been working closely with our beta testers to refine the behavior of the module. So, in this update we’d share two more videos of the module in action.

As with the last couple of videos, these serve to demonstrate the firmware in its beta state which we are actively developing, so everything is subject to change.

Recording and Wave-shaping

One of the core features of Gliss is the ability to draw gestures on the touch sensor which are automatically recorded and can be played back in interesting and useful ways.

• The recorded gesture can be triggered like an envelope either by using the button or by sending a trigger signal to the input of Gliss
• It can be looped to create an LFO with a custom waveform
• It can be played back at any pitch as a wavetable oscillator (you do this by sending a 1V/octave CV signal to the input of Gliss)
• It can even be used as a wave-shaper where you can update the transfer function on the fly. By sending a ramp signal to Gliss you can control the index point you are reading from in the wavetable of the stored gesture. A ramp signal going from 0-5 V, say, will scrub through the wavetable playing back the values. Further, you don't have to use a ramp signal, you can use any waveform to get all kinds of interesting wave-shaper effects.

Puzzled about how all this functionality can live in one module? Here’s Giulio to explain.

Expressive keyboard

The expressive keyboard mode transforms the touch strip into five pressure sensitive buttons with vibrato. Each button can be tuned to a fixed voltage. When you first touch one of the five buttons you will always be in-tune and then it is possible to slide continuously between the fixed notes (performing glissandi) for violin or theremin-like performances. The great thing about this keyboard is that you always know you’ll find the in-tune note when you arrive at the centre of the next button.

The amount of vibrato is configurable through the submenu. Also, you can change the tunings of the individual button by going to the submenu, selecting the button you want to change, and then pressing and dragging to retune.

Both these videos are just a taste of the many things you can do in each mode There are, in fact, many other possibilities we didn’t cover here so stay tuned! In the meantime, thank you so much for your ongoing support and you’ll hear more from us very soon!