Keyboard with Stylus

In this demo, we're using the

Keyboard control with a stylus – in this case an Apple Pencil – to send data regarding pitch, volume, and expression simultaneously. All that data gets packed together in an OSC message when a note is played, when the stylus is moved, or when the note is released.

The Keyboard is being played in Ribbon mode so we can use the stylus for a vibrato effect and slide between notes. Pitch guides are enabled so we can play in-tune when moving the stylus between notes.

A couple of other things we're doing here:

We added buttons for "8va" and "tune". The "8va" button instructs SuperCollider to transpose what we're playing up an octave. The "tune" button tells SuperCollider to ignore horizontal movements of the stylus (pitch bend), which makes it easier to not get out of tune when playing faster passages.
We're including information about the stylus' orientation and tilt, as well as vertical position on the key, which are used to control the timbre of the sound -- specifically, the frequency of a high pass filter, and the presence of a few artifacts an octave or two above the note.
In a few cases, it's easier for SuperCollider to do the heavy lifting in terms of math. For example, there's some logic that transforms notes below MIDI note 63 to lower notes so we hear some of the cool "impulse" artifacts from the Sawtooth wave.

Different styluses and different devices will have different capabilities in terms of pressure sensitivity, tilt, and orientation. The S Pen also works great for something like this, but its values are scaled a bit differently than the ones here, so you'd have to tweak those values in the Keyboard config. Also, Android devices generally don't support touching buttons with your fingers and using the stylus at the same time.

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Keyboard with Stylus