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My research into the earliest usage of joystick controllers in synthesizers finds that details are hard to come by, but suffice it to say that by the early 1970s, joysticks had become a thing that musicians found useful. They came originally, of course, from aircraft and other industrial applications, as they were used to control the ailerons and elevators for flight control via physical wires. The first electronic one was first patented in 1926, which opened it up to the possibility of controlling other things. By the 1960s, they had become widespread in radio-controlled aircraft systems and electric wheelchairs. They wouldn't become part of popular culture until the invention of the first video game consoles in the late 1960s and the appearance of arcade machines in the early 1970s.
The first appearance of a joystick on a synthesizer is commonly believed to be on the EMS VCS3 Putney, introduced in 1969. EMS had built in a remarkable amount of control and possibility through the pin matrix. You could patch pretty much all the controls to it, giving it enormous scope for weird and wonderful noises. It could also scale or attenuate the range of values, allowing some things to be adjusted by small amounts while others were pushed to their maximum. It had no keyboard, so the joystick was the main way of playing the synth beyond self-patched oscillations. You can witness Brian Eno giving the joystick a waggle towards the end of this video of Roxy Music performing on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972 (see below).
Around the same time, Moog released the 958 Joystick XY Controller. It was a standalone box designed to sit alongside your Moog Modular. It could also be used with the Minimoog, and appeared as an optional extra in the manual.
Joysticks continued to pop up sporadically in the 1970s. The 1976 Octave Cat had a rather wonderful expander called the CatStick, which featured multiple VCAs, two LFOs, and a joystick. Apparently, it worked really well with the ARP 2600 as well—and it could even be used as a quadraphonic panner.
Korg threw itself into the fray with the 1979 Korg Sigma that had not one but two joysticks ready for control. One appears to be sprung for pitch bend and also handled noise levels, while the other is loose and flexible for filter cutoff and resonance modulation duties. Korg would see the value in the joystick and dropped it into most of the synths from the 1980s including the Poly-61, Poly-800, and DW-8000, and then on into the M1, Wavestation, and beyond.
Meanwhile, one of the most iconic uses was on Sequential Circuits’ Prophet VS. It served as the control centre of an entirely new form of synthesis. Vector synthesis uses the joystick to mix between four sounds placed at the corners of the joystick's range. For this, the square control pad behind the joystick was rotated 45 degrees so the corners were top, bottom, left, and right.
As a complete aside, joysticks in early arcade machines were largely oriented at 45 degrees and then had a faceplate to restrict movement to forward and backwards, as well as side to side. It was Q-Bert, with the diagonal movement that rotated it back and then restricted it into a criss-cross configuration.
Joysticks do crop up from time to time in synths from the likes of Roland D50, Hartmann Neuron, Novation X-Station, and Modal Argon 8, and now modular is definitely getting some use out of the idea.
Use
Getting under the hood a little bit, the usefulness of the joystick is that it’s a controller that can move in two directions at once, allowing for the control of two things simultaneously. The X-axis could be tied to one parameter and the Y-axis to something else. So you could control the filter while modulating the level or add vibrato while deepening a reverb. It allows for a potentially massive amount of control with a single movement—in a visual and visceral way that is hard for a knob to replicate.
You may be more familiar with an X-Y pad, such as a trackpad on a laptop. Your finger denotes a position on the X and Y axes, and that controls a pointer on screen. The position is defined by two values that change as you move your finger. A joystick uses the same idea, but in a continuous movement, always generating two values. You can move one value without the other. If you move directly side-to-side, the X value changes, but the Y remains the same. Alternatively, you could move forwards and backwards to change Y without affecting X. This gives a lot of scope for affecting single parameters as well as two at once.
The versatility comes in how you use those two values. A joystick could be configured to be zero when centered, so that you get positive and negative values depending on the direction. Alternatively, it could be set to find zero in the bottom left corner, similar to a regular XY graph—and so, to always give you positive values. You can use software algorithms to flip the axis, make values go in opposite directions, scale the output for bigger or smaller changes, or create response curves to give finer detail at the edges. And with enough imagination, we can have multiple layers of interpretation being pulled from two values and spread throughout a synthesizer or modular.
Flying with Modular
When bringing the joystick into a modular setup, it gives developers the opportunity to re-examine the basic XY control and see if they can tease out other control voltage possibilities. One common augmentation is to combine CV generation with Vector-style signal mixing. The Intellijel Planar 2 is a good example of this. It features your regular XY outputs, but also includes four inputs for audio or CV that pass through the joystick and emerge blended at the Mix output, as well as four individual outputs. The joystick determines the levels based on its proximity to each of the four corners.
Planar 2 also has the ability to record movements to create automation over the parameters it controls. The Black Joystick 2 from Erica Synths has a similar record feature but goes in a different direction with the rest of its capabilities. It has four channels of XY control, giving you the ability to control a larger range of parameters either together or separately. It has a whole bunch of LFOs and sine wave generators built in that can be controlled via the joystick and sent to various outputs. It can also work as a quadraphonic panner.
Another take is the Stonk from Tesseract. It has four channels, devoting two to high-resolution audio control and two to CV control, and also produces sum and difference CV outputs. Pushing into new territory, we have CV and audio processing built into the module, where on one side, you can generate LFOs and envelopes, and on the other, dive into reverbs, filtering, and wavefolding.
One factor that's alluded the joystick is being able to add another axis. With XY pads, touch plates, and keyboards, we've been able to incorporate pressure as the third aspect, giving us control in three dimensions. However, pressure doesn't offer the same finesse or range of movement that we have in the X and Y directions.
However, Doepfer has given this a go with the A-174-4 3D Joystick. It adds a "Z" axis in the form of rotation. You still have your regular XY control, but the joystick features a rotatable ring that allows you to throw out another value. It's an interesting approach that uses an almost ridiculously large joystick to provide the control.
Maybe the placement of a joystick amidst the chaos of your rack is not the most ideal solution. In which case, consider the entertainingly named Hi Five & Dig It! From Biopower Audio, a take, perhaps, on the Moog 958 Joystick. This one is packed with features. It can generate five channels of CV that are piped to a Eurorack module via an ethernet cable. The body of the controller also houses a fader, a couple of buttons and a pressure pad, giving you lots of options when it's in your hand. It could be a brilliant way to step away from your rack and focus on control.
The recording of movements has been an interesting development that has become a very popular feature in modular. While we all love being able to get our hands on the knobs and sliders of our modular systems, we only have two hands, and so performing a change and then letting that repeat while we move to another control is a highly desirable outcome. It’s also different from patching in an LFO. LFOs, by nature, are mathematically accurate looping waveforms that are wonderfully precise but very inorganic. The recording of physical movements adds a human, imprecise and nuanced element that can bring your electronic wanderings to life in whole other ways. Joysticks are perfect for this and are able to generate huge amounts of modulating data for the minimum of effort. Once you have a few layers or channels to work with, then you can animate your whole rig with just a few twists.
Going Forward
Joysticks offer a unique controlling experience and can break us out of our singular, one-at-a-time linear parameter mindset. You are intentionally setting yourself up to do some modulation and interact with the machine in creative ways, which is very exciting.
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