The Turtle

I am a bass & guitar player and like most similarly afflicted souls I harbor a little lust for beautifully shaped wood. As a teen, when I could only afford bargain instruments I filled my notebooks with aspirational doodles of Fender and Rickenbacker basses. At one point in my education I considered luthiery as a career. But I found I lack the right mix of talents to be a real professional in that noble field. But I still love working with WOOD!

The Turtle controller is the first controller I built. I used pieces of hardwood that I had on hand, leftover from my abandoned pursuit of luthiery.

Electronically, the turtle controller is not very sophisticated or complex. (hence the absence of a block diagram). It’s an array of 6 pressure/position sensors. for which all the CV’s are brought-out individually through a large DB-25 “umbilical” cable. I added difference amplifiers between both sides of the 5 gaps. So a rolling gesture across the sensors will create 5 more outputs that are roughly similar to a quadrature array.

Physically, there are a few tricks. In the upper photo, the first five sensors are inlaid into a carved & polished handprint of my right hand. There’s an extra sensor on the right in case I grow a sixth finger.

The right three sensors can be moved to a berth on the left (see lower photo) which allows for two-handed playing with the thumb and first two fingers of each hand.