About a year and a half ago, we took on a job of somewhat epic proportions. A rig builder was putting together a new rig for Chris Squire (bassist for Yes). For 30 years, he had been using a custom made foot controller, and it was just falling apart. The rig builder had commissioned someone to build a replacement and he found out, days before the deadline, that basically no work was completed! Through some mutual connections they got in touch with us. He asked if we wanted to take on the project, the only catch being that it had to be done in two days!

After picking myself up off the floor, I started thinking about the job, called him back and told him: if you can get the metal enclosure made in two days, I can have a controller for you in four. We dropped everything and I got going, whipped out a circuit board design and had a local place produce the board immediately. I had to pick up the enclosure from a guy who normally builds race cars. (I have no idea how they got in touch with him). Tech Guy Bryan and I spent the whole weekend wiring the thing. That's a lot of LEDs, wires and switches!

One of the things that made this possible was that the controller itself is pretty simple. The top two rows of buttons send MIDI program changes, and the lower two rows send note on/off messages (they're used to trigger notes on a sampler). But, that's all he wanted, so it worked out for everyone. We saw Yes when they were in town last year, and the controller was there, so I guess they like it!

Wow that's awesome - great to see a shot of Chris's mystery bass rig too - is that a Roland V-Synth XT he's now using for his bass pedals? Load of Ampegs, couple of Marshall JMPs, and what looks like an Ensoniq DP4? Can't really make out anything else from this distance. I'm a huge Chris Squire and Yes fan.

Not sure about the V-Synth, I know he was using a sampler (Akai?) for sure.

I've attached a higher res picture but it's a crappy cell phone camera pic so the higher resolution doesn't help much.

I think we actually have video from backstage where Richard, his bass tech, gave us a tour.

We'll have to look for it this weekend.

Thanks... yeah, it's definitely a V-Synth XT at the top of the right rack.


There's an SWR among the Ampegs (two SVT-2 Pro heads and an SVT-4 Pro) but I can't quite make out the model. According to some article I found it's a Bass 350, which is far from a current model. It's used for the bass pedals apparently. The pale gray unit is an E-MU ESI-2000 sampler, not the Ensoniq unit I thought it was.

Right hand rack looks like the V-Synth, a Samson stereo wireless unit, Sound Sculpture Switchblade and some kind of other Sound Sculpture device that I can't identify (with the turquoise print), a Hush unit and a couple of pedal draws.

Fascinating stuff!

Can I perhaps ask how much a Midi Board like this would cost?

I don't think I want to quote exact prices, but to give you a clue: getting circuit boards made in 24 hours cost us $1000, getting the box made in 2 days cost us over $1000, and tech guy and I spent several days working on it in exclusion of everything else. So yeah, it was expensive.