Eigenharp Google+ Community Archive

I'm afraid I won't be delivering an #eigenchallenge2014 piece this month. I didn't get to put in the hours required and when I played what little I had the feedback was "it's a bit of a dirge". Which, really, was true. So I'm binning it and will start again on something else for June. This note is to say I've not left the challenge behind.

It's a well-established fact that every great classical musician secretly yearns to play the accordion. That's why my contribution to April's #eigenchallenge2014 is an accordion piece. The least interesting thing about it is the tune - "What shall we do with the drunken sailor" is simple even by my standards. What's more interesting is that I've used my newly-acquired Workbench to create a new setup and (also new to me) Omnisphere for the sound. The setup allows the Eigenharp to simulate an accordion, and the tune is really just a simple demonstration of the setup. The setup creates two keygroups on the Pico. The top hand has one keygroup that plays chords - one key for each chord. Each key press runs through three fingerer agents, one for each note of the chord (root, third and fifth). The bottom hand has the other keygroup which plays the melody notes (the piano keys on an accordion). The setup requires the player to use the breath pipe to trigger the ...

After much fun to date with #eigenchallenge2014 I've splashed out on both Workbench and Omnisphere. It's by turns fun and frustrating - like learning to program in a new domain with a new language. The learning curve includes MIDI and related audio things. MIDI seems to be very rudimentary, at least by today's standards. It seems you can't change the volume of a note after you've hit it without attaching extra parameters. Very poor for violin/clarinet type playing. And similar small frustrations and lack of knowledge are making for slow progress - e.g. trying to understand channels in Workbench. My musical contribution to April's challenge will be modest at best. But it's all educational...

Here's my contribution to March's #eigenchallenge2014 . Inspired by Mark Harris's piece last month I decided to see if I could compose a tune myself. In the end I found it difficult to do the bits I thought would be easy, and (relatively) easy to do the bits I thought would be difficult. I found a basic six-note tune fairly quickly, and then played with the rhythm to create something a bit more interesting. Extending it to more than 3-4 bars, though, was challenging, particularly when I got some way in and realised there need to be a break or some other kind of change. Another difficulty was adding the bass part. I had originally wanted to create a melody that underscored the main part, but couldn't manage to create anything that didn't clash. I thought it would be straightforward, but was very wrong. Due to constraints of time I instead used pairs of notes (two notes from chords) on the bass line, which was a bit of cop-out. The whole was composed with a piano so...

Pico Mix scripts in Pico Mix I was playing with Mark Harris's Pico Mix last night (looks nice!) and couldn't work out how to use orange (session) mode. In particular, I couldn't seem to browse or run scripts. I brought up EigenBrowser, but no amount of button pressing changed what I saw or the nature of the sounds. I had put the provided scripts (pico mix 1-8 and user 1-8) in the top level of my Scripts directory. Is anyone able to offer some suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Here's my contribution to February's #eigenchallenge2014 . I'm not particularly pleased with the result, but I was getting fed up with working on it, so just wanted to get shot of it. This month I wanted to use the Eigenharp's live looping capabilities. The track is a live recording, with the only non-live edits being a few seconds of silence chopped of the start and end. Lessons learned... Learning to play broad in sync with the drum track took a while, but I got it quicker than I thought I might. Trying to find appropriate melodies to mix against the main tune was surprisingly difficult - I spent ages trying to find a 4-bar melody that worked under the main 8-bar tune. Selecting the right sound for each part also makes a huge difference. Playing technique is more important than I'd imagined, and it becomes especially obvious when it's recorded and you hear it played back. (I realise it's not great in the recorded version here.) This tune is a whole lot mo...

Here's my offering for the #EigenChallenge2014 (January). The tune featured in an episode the children's TV programme Bagpuss, which I used to watch, and which my daughter still enjoys. Pico in factory default. https://soundcloud.com/niksilver/the-millers-song

After spending about 2-3 months away from the Eigenharp (I've been spending my free time on the latest Coursera Scala course, but the assignments are all done now) I finally picked it up again yesterday. It felt good to be playing with it again. I'd forgotten lots of basics, but remembered more than I expected of the tune I was last learning. The path to musicality is far too long, but the journey continues to have its moments of satisfaction.

Following Tim Roberts's post elsewhere in this community I thought I'd share how I'm currently connecting myself to my Pico: elastic bands. No neck strap required. They make it really secure and it solves the problem I had about wanting the hooks to go under my thumbs. Because I often rest the Pico on my lap it's easy to push it up and lift it and the hooks off my thumbs. With the elastic bands that's no longer a problem.