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Had another idea - something I'd like to see for the Alpha is the ability to choose the tonic note on the keyboard itself. I find that to play a particular phrase I need a good few notes above the tonic, and some below it as well. This means if the keyboard is split, and in chromatic mode, I have to make sure the tonic note is somewhere in the centre of the keygroup I'm playing on. Getting this right with the scale controls is perfectly possible, but what would be ideal is to have a tonic selection mode (perhaps accessed with the keygroup mode key), that allows you to choose the location just by pressing the desired key.

What might be even better is to make it work with two keypresses - the first one selects which note is being used as the tonic, offset from the top left of the keygroup as normal. The second press sets where that note will be and then the mode quits back to the most recent instrument. This way you can select this new mode, and then press twice as if you were 'picking up' the key layout and 'dropping' it in the desired location. How exactly it interacts with custom scales, courses, the stringer agents and any crazy non rectilinear keygroups I'm not sure, but it seems like it would do something vaguely intuitive even so.

Thoughts?

I think this is a great idea but does have a couple of tiny problem: you could only change the tonic to a note that exists in your scale, and you could never change it to a note lower than its current setting.

In conjunction with having certain playing keys lit all the time, maybe a nudger would work.

For info, on the Pico, the tonic controls allow you to set the tonic to any note, even if it's not in the scale. (see page 4, "3. Key Control" in the Pico Quick Reference)

Hi all,

There is a mechanism in EigenD for changing the first note of your playing Keygroup to a note other than the tonic - it is referred to in Belcanto as the 'base note'. Using Belcanto, you can define the 'base note' as an offset (positive or negative) from the tonic. More information on this subject is included in the Keygroup reference article on the wiki in the 'Example' section under the subheading 'Setting the Base Note'.

If you have any more questions please let me know.

Sam
Eigenlabs Software Department

The base note decouples the center of the scale from the tonic and scale itself - it allows you to move the geometry of the arrangement around pretty much as you choose. So if you want a tonic of say D, in the middle of a Keygroup, you can set a base note of 10 (assuming a 20 key Keygroup) and a tonic of D.

If you want to be able to dynamically move the position of the tonic in real time without having to get fancy with Belcanto (and I admire your desire for this - it'll take some learning to not get horribly confused) it is quite possible to set a Talker up to move it around. I think moving the base note up and down with a nudger is probably a bad idea as I think I'd personally would lose track of where I was in a microsecond or so, but I can see absolute shifts being very useful, especially as with a Talker that would be instant. This might well be worth doing - how would you see this set up?

John

I wasn't envisaging using it during playing particularly, although that would possibly be useful (and quite a headache as john says!). If it were used in performace, it's hard to know where the talker would go, maybe it could live in a keygroup mode which you can place on a small keygroup, and point it at the main one, or just put it on a spare key in the corner somewhere and sacrifice one note (since using it would mean you stay near the centre of the keyboard anyway..) ?

I guess I'll be able to do this all myself once the workbench arrives?

How bout having the ability to attach any belcanto phrase (script) to a midi note via a global map file or something?

This is where the software developers get nervous ;) Yeah but they are going to spray midi at us and crash the system. Yeah probably. But seriously, it's a good idea. I might want to turn on/off pitch bend on an instrument via foot controller.

Now that were are on this subject, I would really like to have a way to enter phrases that doesn't need a commandline. If I could send phrases by a communication channel, which I'm sure is what you are doing already with EigenBrowser, then I could create my own little interfaces in MaxForLive or whatever to have a mixer interface or other nice additions that I'm sure will not come soon in eigenD. Ok, I know this is a talker. Does a talker though need to be a software component? Is the protocol between a talker and the host binary? It would be lovely to have a simple textual protocol on an open comm channel. But I digress....

I know....wait for the open source. It's hard to be patient.

Just to pick up on what barnone was saying about talkers - am I right in saying that a 'talker' is an EigenD agent, which contains some belcanto frgament in some pre-compiled form, and can be attached to a key and /or wired up to MIDI-in etc, whereas what barnone is suggesting is the ability to have access to the input of the belcanto interpreter from a software system (which as he points out, the EigenCommander is an example of), and that this is not the same thing?