Use a Wacom Bamboo pen tablet as a MIDI CC controller

MidiStylus - Wacom Bamboo Tablet to MIDI

One of my most recent toys is a Wacom Bamboo pen tablet.

I'm using it for developing animations for an old school Sierra-style adventure game that I'm working on, but I started thinking that it would be an interesting way to interact with music software via MIDI. The tablet registers pressure as well as X and Y location, so that's three potential control values I can transmit in realtime to Ableton or some other piece of music software.

After a weekend of work I came up with MidiStylus. You can download it here.

The program interface is pretty simple:

You just drag the stylus around the large gray workspace in the middle of the window. The status bar at the bottom will show you the MIDI values that you''re transmitting to the three controls specified in the settings window:

The program can be set to transmit any MIDI control value on any MIDI channel.

I'll be hooking it up to AudioMulch next weekend and posting some of the experiments here.

musicsoftwaretablet
Posted by: Scott Metoyer
Last revised: 26 Jan, 2012 02:42 AM History

Comments

McAtee
McAtee
26 Apr, 2011 02:10 AM @ version 2

Thank you very much - you have no idea how much I have wanted a program like this :D

james
james
12 Jan, 2011 02:11 AM @ version 2

Any chance of making a mac version, maybe with support for bamboo multi-touch ;)

Suranjan
Suranjan
26 Jan, 2012 02:11 AM @ version 2

May I use this setup (Wacom Bamboo pen tablet + MidiStylus) to control the MIDI pitch bend parameters ? Can you please guide me how to do it ? Also, does the MidiStylus tool have to be used with Wacom Bamboo pen tablet only or it may be used with other Wacom products as well ?

Thanks so much.

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