Tuna DJ Gear has announced that their Kickstarter project to create Tuna Knobs – tangible knobs for touchscreen devices – is fully funded.
They have also announced ‘stretch goals’ for funding. Here’s what they have to say about the stretch goals:
If we reach 25.000 Euro we can make sure that all Knobs (and this will be a kickstarter first) will be delivered a month before we promised! Because we can scale the production even faster and bigger than we anticipated this will be do-able!
If we reach 32.500 Euro we will be adding colour choice for our backers. This will be unique and if the Knobs will be ever on the market, this won’t be available in the shops! We have chosen red and blue, but we will have a survey after the kickstarter to ask you for the third colour of which you can choose.
Last but not least, if we reach 40.000 Euro we will be investing in yet another injection mold for a custom made hard travel case instead of the promised pouch. This will keep your knobs safe and cool looking at the same time! We are currently in the design process of this so as soon as we think it is cool enough we will update you on it!
Details are available at the project site.
I’m not surprised this is doing well. It is a weird concept, but makes sense for a pretty specific set of tasks.
There was no mention (above) of sliders, but I expect that would come on the heels of this soon enough.
Sliders are great in theory, but they take up way more room. Sliders rule because you can move more than 2 at once, whereas with knobs you can only turn 2 at once. What about a velocity sensitive touch strip that could act like a keyboard, but could be divide into zones to act like drum pads or for assigning different scales?
I have very mixed feelings about this. On the other hand I think it is a neat idea, but I think it also ruins the flexibility of touchscreen.
I know from my own experience how real knobs and sliders just seem to have a better feeling when controlling parameters. Touchscreen can be a little awkward sometimes. But in this case, you only get knobs, not sliders, so it is only half solution anyway. It is also a good question that how many touchscreen software this is usable with?
Besides that, I am worried about latency. If you use these on iPad, using it as a control surface for a DAW (e.g Ableton Live), then there is always some latency due to WiFi connection. Do these knobs increase latency. And how accurate they are?
But my strongest criticism is the idea of putting fixed knobs on a surface that is very flexible in itself. I use both Lemur and TouchAble on several iPads to control Ableton Live. Although iPad lacks e.g. velocity it has one real benefit. Your touch enabled control surface adapts to what ever you are doing. The layout changes whether I am controlling clips, routing, software instrument, keyboard matrix, effects etc. That is the strongest point on having a screen as a control surface. Now, if you have those knobs there fixed on, you lose that flexibility.
As a side note, if you want best of the both world, I found out the best solution to be Livid Base. It is really flexible and it has probably the best aftertouch and velocity sensitivity I have experienced.
All valid concerns, but why criticize a product you’ve never seen or used?
You could use the extra money to drop the price/unit.
+1 agree
Wow this is beyond useless, especially in a multi window environment. Maybe good for custom TouchOSC patches, but useless for anything else. The people will love it 🙂
They may be ‘beyond useless’ to you, but more open-minded people may see this as an inexpensive option for experimenting with tangible controllers.
at $10 a knob, how is that cheap?
pardon, ‘inexpensive’
When touch osc first came out i had the same idea about getting some press on controls for it, but then i decided it was a bad idea because you’d have to move them every time you loaded a different template, every control will have to fit the knob perfectly or it will be useless, the touch screen is nice enough to use and proper controllers can be had for next to nothing anyways. I am amazed the kick starter has gone so well. Be good to see them in use
People will fund anything. These will end up in your junk draw.
I think what they did with the 1 Euro for earlybirds was pretty darn clever – within minutes they had 50 backers… I would imagine that created a lot of traction and possibly accounts, at least in part, for why they have done so well here!
Also very interested to see how they workout in practice 🙂
The cost alone will kill this product.
They’ve already raised twice the amount needed to produce the product, so it would appear to be a big success.
Mine tuned up…
And whoever called it as crap, was basically right!!
The thing sticks ok, but you have to apply a bit of pressure to get it to work at all and then it starts sliding about so you lose the positioning. I’d say 90% fail on attempted knob adjustments.
Like anything… It is possible that you could get better and quite good with this… but meh!
A shame, I had kinda hoped these would be alright and a bit of fun, but they’re not even that really 🙁