Gadgetory

my name is Ian golden and I design DJ products the difference between a DJ tech tools product and other controllers out there is that our products are designed to be fun they're designed to be powerful and they're designed to really make things it make it easy to do amazing things so how did the midi fighter come about well we made this product here this is actually the original one this guy called me from LA after I had taken my VCI 100 and had installed arcade buttons in it and this guy in LA Jonathan asked me to make one for him and I did and it was such a hit that we started making them as a product for people and we'd make these customized controllers with arcade buttons of people's choice it was really expensive to make but people love them and we discovered hey you know what this arcade button thing is pretty rad we should make an arcade button controller and so the very first controller we made was the MIDI fighter we wanted to find a way to actually be able to give people this customization right in the product so they can pop the arcade buttons out put different colors in there build it themselves and kind of put it all in a fun DIY kit all right so here we are in the DJ tech tools assembly lab we've got Mitch here building some circuit boards for the MIDI fighter pro you've got a whole stack of MIDI fighters over there waiting to go out we've gone from one tiny little room in my apartment literally to this and now we've outgrown it so we're moving on to something bigger but this is where all the controllers come out of right now those are our new chroma caps over there you've got six or seven different funky colors so people can customise their their MIDI controllers with the color they want and then on your right is the assembly station where we put all the MIDI fighters together the MIDI fighter has grown up now and we've added the MIDI fighter 3d to the line and that's this guy here and the difference is that this is a lot more scalable we produce these by hand in the office one by one and it's really time consuming to do that and we want to be able to give people the option of changing out their buttons themselves inside the software so what we did to make the 3d of 3d is we put a gyroscope and accelerometer and a compass in it so we're actually able to predictably determine exactly where in space this controller at any time in all three dimensions so let's say I turn on a button and I hit button I turn on an effect I can then modulate that effect by moving the MIDI fighter I'm in either direction let's say I want to reduce the amount we affect I might tilt it forward and lower that registers but when you're holding it you now have the benefit of muscle memory and gravity so you can actually use you know the position of your full body and you start to get into this kind of more musical muscle memory space where you've forgotten about the computer