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Hi,

I know that this is probably a pipe-dream, but you never know, I thought I'd bring it up anyway.

When I study an instrument, I work in different modes. Besides the obvious playing, performing, composing, searching sounds, ... I also function in a technique practicing mode. When doing this, I don't care about beautiful sound at all, I just practice dexterity, finger patterns, scales, etc etc. With the electric guitar I did this unamplified, just sitting in the couch, watching TV. The sound of the strings is sufficient to allow me to evaluate if what I'm playing is correct.

I miss this with the Alpha. I like to practice technique frequently for short periods of time, whenever I get the chance (a few times a day ideally). I really don't want to hook the Alpha up to a computer, wait for everything to load, check for the right sounds, etc.

Since the Alpha has a headphone socket, I'm wondering if there's any possibility at all to have a default startup mode in which it starts up when it's connected to the base station without EigenD running. This mode would have a basic synth sound and allow the selection of scales and tonics, that's it. No splits, no drummer, no recording, no sequencer, nothing else.

This would allow people that study the instrument to quickly hook it up, pop in earplugs and practice technique.

Thoughts?

Geert

Hi John,

As said in my initial post, I'm really not interested in the full capabilities of a computer with AUs or VSTs, nor the full capabilities of EigenD. I'm really thinking of what the Continuum is doing in their latest revision. It's got a built-in DSP chip that is dedicated to make a number specific sounds that cover much of the expressiveness of the instrument. This allows you to quickly just start it up, plug a headphone in and practice technique. Of course, a lot of the possibilities that are only available when connecting to a Kyma or through MIDI aren't available in this mode. Is does allow you to very quickly practice technique though.

Anyway, I fully understand your reasoning for not integrating a full-blown EigenD into the basestation, that totally makes sense. I'm thinking of buying a Mac Mini indeed for this purpose.

Take care,

Geert

Half the problem here lies in what you mean by practice. On things like the Continuum this doesn't really involve much in the way of odd (sometimes bespoke) key layouts, dynamic switching between them, learning to use recordings etc etc. Part of the whole objective of mastering an Eigenharp setup is getting fluid with these highly dynamic setups, which means a general purpose CPU has to be running a subset of EigenD (which does most of these things), and the data rates are high so the CPU needs to be fairly capable. As soon as this is the case, you're really looking at a PC. If we build one in, the one thing I can be pretty sure about is that it'll be way more expensive than the equivalent Dell box as these are made in vast quantities. It will also take just as long to boot up at that box, which does kind of erode most of the advantage of embedded hardware.

Even if we stripped out most of the standard factory setup to make a 'practice setup' you are still left with a very great deal of code running - a lot more than will go on a stadard DSP chip and considerable more than will fit in most smallish FPGA cores. Open sourcing the code isn't really going to help you much with this - you'll still need a CPU whatever you do.

It's not inconceivable that we'll be able (and want) to do this in the future, but I think the time will be several years from now, when the there are standard setups that many use and the risk of fosilising the wrong thing in firmware is low. There have been so many changes (and many still to come) to EigenD in the last six months, all driven from experience gained by us all as we're all learning to play the instruments - this rate of change would have been utterly inconceivable if any kind of firmware had been involved - changes to firmware are over ten times as expensive (actually, when I think about it I think that is probably a low estimate of the multiple) and time consuming as software. Mike's comment about making learning facilities available is a great example of this. With EigenD running on a computer this is a lot easier, faster and cheaper to contemplate playing with (and we have been thinking a lot along those lines as we see a large potential for the Pico's in the education sector), if it were in firmware it would be out of the question in sensible timescales.

This isn't a religious issue for us, it's just about time, flexibility and cost. I'd love to be able to have a basic EigenD running in the hardware (like both of you, my main instrument is acoustic guitar so I know where you're coming from), it just don't make much sense right now.

John

I totally understand that the firmware aspect is not a route anyone really wants to probably go down with this practicing aspect.

Here's something to think about (or to ignore completely, of course). I'm not asking for this to be even put on the wish-list - I'm just wondering 'what if'.

I have a little device here called an o2 Joggler. I picked it up for £50. It has a 1.3ghz processor in it, USB socket, speakers, wifi device, etc. It boots from it's internal memory by default (has some kind of modified Linux OS on it with a Flash front-end), or, and here's the thing I'm trying to highlight, it boots from a USB stick. I want to update an application, I put the USB stick in my PC, copy the relevant files over, stick it back in the Joggler.

The only bad point about it (with regards to EigenD, or even a stripped-down EigenD) is that it's a Linux device (or rather, at the moment, people have only gotten Linux working on it nicely).

So, in the future (years, perhaps), I can imagine a little £50 box with a stripped down-EigenD running from a USB stick, plug in your USB cable and there you go, simple synths and nothing particularly CPU-taxing. Want to update EigenD? Put the stick in your PC/Mac and update it, no problems.

Thanks for reading through these thoughts from a crazy person ;)