New Pulse High-Speed 3D Music Controller

pulse-3d-controller

Titan Reality has introduced the Pulse 3D music controller – a new gestural music controller.

Pulse is a high-speed 3D controller and an ‘intelligent space and surface’ to interact with. It can also recognize hand gestures and objects to give you a more realistic and creative way of controlling sound. 

Here is the official video intro:

Pulse can be used as a DJ deck, drum, hand percussion, keyboard, 3D controlled sound, mixer, harp, drum machine, guitar or vocal effect and more.

titan-reality-pulse-midi-controller

Pulse manufacturing is being funded via a Kickstarter project, Technical details on how the Pulse are currently sparse on the campaign site, but it appears to use proprietary communication. They note:

Pulse apps run on most platforms (OSX, iOS, Android, Windows) and are available as plugins in your favorite music software (Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Logic Pro X, Garage Band…). Pulse and its apps are very high resolution compared to MIDI but stay compatible.

The Pulse is available to Kickstarter backers starting at £750. See the project site for details.

18 thoughts on “New Pulse High-Speed 3D Music Controller

  1. Idk man ……. It looks awesome for sure but I have SOoooOoo many controllers and I’m pretty much covered on all bases. I’ve been leaning more toward stand alone hardware lately. I don’t think I’m alone either.

    1. I agree, with already plenty of controllers at hand, including apps running on touchscreens, it is difficult to spend a lot of money for this.

    1. my experience with Leap Motion is that it depends much on the lighting conditions. The tracking is not always accurate. You may get good accuracy, but there are still some drop-outs from time to time. I prefer to use the Doepfer A-178 for such tasks, although it has only one dynamic parameter; but it is always accurate.

      I haven’t used Leap Motion for some time, although I would like to. That’s why I’m somehow interested in Pulse. If it has better accuracy, combined with touch, pressure, velocity, I might sell my Leap Motion and get Pulse. But I’m not sure. I have already a nice collection of different controllers.

    2. you can’t hit a Leap Motion!!! This look like a proper drum controller to me. I can’t dampen the mesh on my Roland TD 10k, and it sounds always the same wherever I hit it. I was looking for a new generation of electronic drum, and this one seems to have (finally) reach my expectations

  2. It looks like it combines the features of Leap Motion with a few other technologies.

    At first, I wanted to hate this, just because it was looking like yet another “ground breaking” “game changer” etc. But ultimately it comes down to this: How well executed is the design?

    If it is very responsive, low-latency, and versatile, I think it will be a powerful way to make music. However, the devil is in the details. It is very possible that this will fall short either by being priced out of reach, or just not really working well in real-world applications.

    I do think the time is ripe for the next artificial drum thing. Korg did it a while ago, maybe Roland. But this looks like it could be cool — if it does that well.

    The demo with synths looks pretty weak. I’d much rather play a keyboard.

  3. Moving past 7 bit midi is important for creating playable, expressive controllers. I’m glad that this product has done that but I also worry if they are not using NRPN or OSC what kind of compatibility and support problems it’s going to have.

  4. Oooh, just… no. ‘App Marketplace’, ‘Virtual Reality’, ‘Discover The Future’. You’re just a buzzword feeding frenzy, aren’t you?

    If this were open source hardware, I’d be down with that, but trying to tack an exclusive ‘app store’ onto an expensive sensor-mit-blinkenlights? The ipad already is a store attached to an expensive sensor… so many red flags on this.

    1. I hope not. With four+ patents, an innovation award winning and world-class team working night and day for the last four years, and starting an innovation platform with Abbey Road’s quality people we’ll only take pride in our customer’s feedback.
      The iPad brought many desires to musicians but it is not a device designed for music. You can’t hit it, it’s fragile, slow and isn’t velocity friendly, also your movements are in 3D. Our content platform is offering advanced and high-resolution software with NEW functionalities never seen before in music software.
      Precisely it is up to you to support real innovation. How long has it been since we’ve seen something really new in the musical instrument industry. The advanced tech is there while 1980’s tech is still widely present in the stores. It seems efforts and investments are not the priority for many today.
      We are musicians ourselves, and some of us worked for aerospace, industrial instrumentation, music software, algorithm and science. We invested our own money to make this possible.
      We decided to create Titan Reality to kill buzzwords and create a real high-tech platform for musicians.

      Much music love

  5. 750GBP for a controller that comes with a few “apps”.
    If you want new “apps” you have to buy them at their “Explore” store.
    There’s no SDK to connect the Pulse to other software. This makes sense from a business point of view as it ties it to their store, but it locks the user to whatever is available at the store. Too restrictive for me.

    They should take a look at what others have made (Lemur comes to mind, as does the Launchpad Pro and it’s siblings) and allow the end user to do with the hardware whatever they want. Don’t be greedy. You might be shooting yourself in the foot.

    1. from the website:
      Play any musical instrument or music device you want with Pulse* and its Apps. Each Titan Reality App is free and makes Pulse* a new instrument or piece of audio gear. Simply connect your Pulse* controller to a Titan Reality App or plugin, and get access to thousands of virtual musical instruments, electronic sounds, effects, virtual microphones, venue acoustics and audio gear.

      so if everything is free and the offer a SDK…….. i`m in

    2. It is obviously Controlling Midi out of the box.
      Control any software you want. plus our plugins and apps are midi compatible too.
      We didn’t create the platform to “lock people” quite the opposite: access 1000s of high-resolution instruments with features you have never seen before in software or hardware:)

      We are musicians, we are engineers, we are Titan Reality:)

      Precisely think of a Lemur in 3D with high-resolution with gesture recognition working at 1000fps. High-speed!

  6. Haven’t you seen what they do with the quadri, the Oculus and Google Earth in the video? It’s obvious that there will be a SDK released. You can’t sell hardware without one anyway. I hope it does sound good because none of the controller I have can be used professionally for music. It’s just for fun. I want to give a chance to Pulse.

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