Twister – MIDI Controlled VCA Automation

After fighting with the Jellinghaus C-Mix system, I tried a new and seemingly simpler automation solution – the Twister.

A 1U rack mounted unit with 8 MIDI controllable VCA’s, to be inserted in your signal path for volume automation and control. With simple MIDI controller data, you can control the VCA levels, and thus incorporate the mix data in your MIDI sequence.

You can save the volume settings of the 8 VCA in 99 user memories, recalled by MIDI program changes.

But the unit has some major flaws. The most obvious being a loud zipper noise with continuous fader moves, which renders the unit virtually useless for anything but static snapshots.Also the MIDI implementation is flaky, so the whole experience was not very convincing, and I had to part with the unit after less than a year.

I guess that is also why the unit was only produced in small numbers, and therefore is very rare today.

Period: 1986-87