November 28, 2017

In 2016, I started a series of blog entries telling the story of how the Tonal Plexus came to be. That story has still not been completely told. Some of you may know that in 2015, DIY units and prototype Tonal Plexus hardware were for sale through this website. During that time, PDF documents including enclosure designs were also available for download. My idea at the time was to try to help people build DIY Tonal Plexus keyboards. For a number of reasons, many of them obvious, that effort was not really successful.

Something I had done as a part of that effort was to try to document the process of building a Tonal Plexus keyboard on video. Only now some years later have I been able to spend time with all the footage and edit it into something presentable. Although much of the building process is not shown, the resulting half-hour video should at least give some idea of what kind of work went into building a U-PLEX, and will probably shed more light onto why the idea of a DIY Tonal Plexus poses some unusual problems. Of all the Tonal Plexus designs, the U-PLEX is the simplest, because it is only a MIDI controller (not a synthesizer), it also contains no tuning functions itself. Whereas the TPX line of keyboards took from 2 to 4 weeks to build, a U-PLEX could be made within a week with time to spare.

More difficult work, such as working with sheet metal, went into the TPX units, which also have generally speaking much more complicated designs than the U-PLEX. In some ways, the TPX building process was more similar to the TBX1 enclosure-making process, which I also attempted to document in this video.

Best Regards,
Aaron