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hello, i play the pico....

and i dont have workbench...

what i want to do is set up my pico so that the notes are arranged in two vertical rows .. i would like to keep all the other aspect of the eigenharps controls the same. (i plan on playing in scales)

original octave Higher Octave
1{ 1
2{ 2
3{ 3
4{ 4
5{ 5
6{ 6
7{ 7
8{ 8

basically 2 octaves running parallel

i figure i will have to open up eigen commander

but what exactly i dont know,

thanks in advance

Just a follow up, I realised that you were also asking in your post title as to what courses are. Eigenharps have two concepts of key layout that operate in parallel. The first is the simple physical layout, described and edited as a simple x/y layout. This type of way of manipulating keys is usually used for items where maintaining a strong relationship between a physical key and an action is important. A good example would be connecting a key to set a certain scale - you don't want this key moving around as you change tonic or scale, you want it to stay where you left it.

The second concept in keys is the musical layout , which is done via the concept of courses and keys and is used where you do want keys to do different things (usually play different notes) as you change tonic and scale. Courses are like sequences of keys that you can assign in a arbitrary manner. Normally one assigns keys to a course in strips, usually downwards on the instrument, but this is not fixed, if you want you can assign them in little hexagons or any other mad arrangement that takes your fancy. Once you have your keys assigned to a course in a certain order then you can assign an offset to each course, and this can be used by the Scaler agent when it adds the note frequencies to produce musical offsets for each course.

Probably the easiest way to think about this is that in the simplest case, courses as vertical strips on the instrument, you can get it to behave like a guitar or viol family instrument ('cello, violin etc) with strings but with the added ability to have a scale on each string rather than being confined to a chromatic arrangement. This gives you lots of opportunities to play, as guitarists routinely do, with different 'open tunings', with different tuning offsets between courses. There are a lot of musically useful and inspiring as well a fun things you can do with this. A tour through youtube looking at what guitarists do with open tunings can illustrate this well. If you started off as a guitarist and think, as I often do, in terms of 'shapes' on the fingerboard then this also leads to a lot of interesting outcomes and can be a great writing inspiration.

On the Pico, courses are less useful that on the larger instruments due to there only being two strips of keys, so you can probably ignore them for now, although there is no reason you couldn't make each vertical strip a course and use that to control the scale or pitch offset for each hand in the kind of arrangement you are thinking of. If you want each side to be in the same scale and drive the same sound (ie, all you want is a pitch offset beween them) you could even use two courses to do it instead of needing to make a setup with additional keygroups.

I hope that helps to make it clearer.

John

Belcanto will probably remain as it is for now, although there's a strong possibility that commander may become part of Workbench or Stage at some point as it desperately needs a rewrite (it uses a very old graphics library that is seriously showing it's age) and if rewritten that is the logical home for it., so I wouldn't bank on it remaining a part of EigenD Base forever. Jury is out on that though. Oddly, if Belcanto gets used much for modifying and building setups that will probably precipitate such a move as we're very keen to discourage such use. We don't want to prohibit it, but as a way to save money it's a terrible idea and it brings a lot of problems, both to Eigenlabs and the community of users, as setups made one way are really not compatible with the other way. This is a usability nightmare that's only really manageable if it's a seriously uncommon circumstance.

If you do want to play with configuring EigenD to any extent I do strongly advies the use of Workbench. It costs, with six months of updates, around £115 plus tax and you can, if you have already purchased EigenD Base get the balance of your update period back against that, reducing the cost further. I can speak from experience when I tell you you really don't have to do much to make that a good buy - it's not just the ability fo change configuration but also the overview and visibility it gives you of what you have done. You should also bear in mind that as you modify a setup using Belcanto it can often no longer be sensibly opened in Workbench, which is the principal reason that we do not support doing that. It's very hard to debug a setup that someone has been hacking at in Belcanto, and it's hard for anyone to help someone who has got in a muddle. And believe me, it's very easy to get in a muddle using Belcanto to modify and build setups, no matter how technical you are.

Welcome to the world of Eigenharps by the way. If you're a developer you should check out the Open Source release on Github. We build directly using this release so it tracks what we're doing, and it's pretty easy to write your own Agents these days, if you know some C++ and Python. There's a load of technical information on the Wiki in the developers section, including all the presentations from last years Devcon.

John

@Hodari, for your alternate note layout you should also take a look at the thread on A chord-friendly "scale" for Pico. It's about producing a layout that is exactly 90-degrees to what you want(!) but I'm sure you can adapt it.

@john, on the subject of the future of Belcanto, I do hope it doesn't become inaccessible for non-pro users. I do realise that's a separate issue from whether commander is part of Base or Pro.

The accessibility of Belcanto for non-Pro users should be considered valuable to Eigenlabs for a few reasons. (i) It gives everyone more ways to tinker with their Eigenharp, which just makes it much more fun to people with that kind of sensibility (which I image is an awful lot of us); (ii) it still gives you the feeling that you can experience the Eigenharp's possibilities, even if you're not a Pro; (iii) it's only by trying to configure things with Belcanto that you can start to appreciate what a godsend Workbench might be;

And of course you shouldn't have to support or debug my Belcanto setups. To me that is so obvious you shouldn't even be saying it. If I was to write something silly or mistaken with Belcanto and post my question to the forums then I have no right to get a reply. If someone does reply, then that's great. If someone from Eigenlabs replies, then that's extra-great. And if no-one replies, then c'est la vie -- I certainly won't feel cheated. I don't expect Eigenlabs to support my Belcanto scripts any more than I expect Oracle to support or debug my Java code. Perversely, by saying "we can't support or debug setups with Belcanto" you plant the seed of doubt in people's heads that maybe you should be supporting them, and that this is a responsibility that you're shirking. The truth is, of course, the opposite. I'd like to see you not supporting Belcanto setups simply by staying silent on the subject.

Meanwhile, it's fun for us non-Eigenlabs people, Pro or non-Pro, to explore the world of the Eigenharp with Belcanto. And maybe some of us will go on to upgrade to Workbench.

@Hodari, your request has bin round my head...

This can be achieved with a simple user scale, just copy/paste this into the user scales.txt file (located in "user"/library/EIgenlabs/Scale Manager

[Two courses major]
;This scale is a major scale on two courses
intervals=0 2 4 5 12 14 16 17 7 9 11 12 19 21 23 24 24

Then launch Eigenbrowser (cmd+B) and either using your Pico browse selection Scale Control or STAGE load the pretended user scale.

And like this you can have as many as you like!!
couple more examples:

;This scale is a major scale on two courses - 2 octaves apart
intervals=0 2 4 5 24 26 28 29 7 9 11 12 31 33 35 36 36

[Two courses minor harmonic two octave]
;This scale is a major scale on two courses - 2 octaves apart
intervals=0 2 3 5 24 26 27 29 7 8 11 12 31 32 35 36 24

[Two courses minor harmonic two octave]
;This scale is a major scale on two courses - 2 octaves apart
intervals=0 2 3 5 24 26 27 29 7 9 11 12 31 33 35 36 24

No belcanto in sight and no major change or even keyboard layout; it gets you to whatever intervals config you want!

Let me know how it goes...
(sure there are even more ways....)