Haken Audio

The Haken Audio TriOctave Pedal lets you play a three octave range without moving your hands on the Continuum’s playing surface, allowing you to play fast passages with accurate continuous-pitch finger placement.

With skill and practice, you an use the TriOctave Pedal to do fast playing with each note having its own pitch. This simple idea has been around since the 1930s but it has been lost in a world dominated by keyboards and tuning tables.

The Haken Audio TriOctave Pedal consists of a pair switch pedals within a custom 3D-printed no-slip enclosure. TRS adapters allow connection to the Slim Continuum, ContinuuMini, or Full/Half Size Thick Continuum. This setup is optimized in the Continuum/ContinuuMini firmware to facilitate fast and accurate pitch octave switching.

The TriOctave pedal is for sale as a pre-assembled unit from the Haken Audio Store for $89.00, or you can obtain the components yourself and 3D print your own enclosure.

You might think that it is impossible to play quickly on a continuous-pitch surface because fingers must be placed accurately. However, Oskar Sala developed a virtuosic playing technique which uses minimal finger movement combined with skilled use of his three-octave pedal. Listen to this recording of Oskar Sala showing what is possible on a Trautonium, which, like a Continuum, is a continuous-pitch instrument that requires accurate finger placement.

In the above image notice how the fingers are carefully “parked” with the precise placement for pitches within the octave. Oskar Sala realized that, together with 3-octave switching, wide horizontal finger movement could be virtually eliminated — only slight finger pressure changes are needed to play a 3-octave passage, while also retaining expressive pitch inflections.

The TriOctave pedal is available for purchase from the Haken Audio Store for $89.00. It is also possible to construct your own TriOctave pedal using the these materials:

• Custom 3D printed enclosure, printable from this STL file.

• Non-slip backing for the bottom of the enclosure, X-Protector Non-Slip Pads 5x4" B0B29NVD8R.

• Two Yamaha FC-5 pedals.

• Adapter for connection to Slim Continuum or ContinuuMini (HOSA YPP-117)

• Adapter for connection to Full and Half Size Thick Continuum (HOSA YMP-137).

The connection to a Slim Continuum is through its 3.5mm jack labeled I2C, so you can connect three pedals* to your Slim Continuum. Haken Audio suggests you connect a TriOctave Pedal to I2C, an Expression Pedal (Yamaha FC-7) to Pedal 1, and a Continuous Damper (Yamaha FC-4a or FC-4) to Pedal 2.

*This three-pedal capability is not available for the ContinuuMini nor the Full and Half Size Thick Continuums.