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When I first got my Pico I found it great for improvisation but extremely frustrating for playing pieces I had in books, in my head or on the backs of envelopes (literally) that were essentially chord sequences. This was mainly due to not being a trained musician and being able to look and say, "oh, that's clearly Eb dorian". So, as I am a programmer, I wrote myself an application to help me - which I am now sharing freely with the rest of you.

EigenTab takes a set of chords and tells you which key/scale to configure on your Eigenharp. It also shows you the key-shapes to play for those chords. It can be used online or can be save to use offline on the desktop or iPad/iPhone.

It has a few limitations currently:
- only does scales with up to 8-notes
- doesn't allow for custom key layouts
- only been applied to the Pico. If someone will give me a Tau and/or Alpha I will test those, too :-)

I am very interested in feedback and open to any suggestions on improvements/corrections.

Right now my to do list includes:
- scales with more than 8 notes
- custom scales (if one doesn't exist EigenTab tells you what to configure)
- hide editor controls so you can get 'pretty-printable' chord diagrams
- button to show all applicable chord diagrams for a key/scale
- ability to add 'lyric rows' so you can have words, too
- prioritization of key/scale by greatest range of notes

Thanks, Bar-none!

How could I make it better for Alpha/Tau owners?

What a great idea and effective realization.

Cheers, m

Here is a bit of Alpha detail

The default Alpha keygroup uses similar blocks of 4 keys except they are 5 (or 4 / Tau?) courses wide instead of 2. The courses follow the scale pattern downward. So the 5th step in a scale pattern will be to the left and the next step will be below at all times.

Here is an Alpha C mapping.

Some time ago I played with the idea of chord diagrams which you can see here.

m

That would seem to be a reasonable extension.

Initially, I just wanted to visualize the layout. Then to make something like guitar diagrams. What I found, at least for myself, was that it was much easier to switch to chromatic and learn the song and I abandoned the work.

One thing that I observed from the exercise is that, depending on the preceding or following chord, it is sometimes easier to move across or down the keyboard... the whole exercise is (unsurprisingly) like working out guitar fingering.

Your effort is really interesting, particularly for anyone approaching the instrument fresh.

I wonder if it has the potential to spit out song-specific 'scales' that optimize (whatever that means) fingering. That might be particularly useful on the pico

Chromatic certainly fits on the larger keyboards better, but scales are great for just noodling or improvising. If you are not playing the lead line you usually don't need the stray accidentals. A pico might be small, but that has advantages too.

I had thought at one point that it might make sense (for some specific applications) to make up 'scales' for a pico that simply map 4 chords to each 4 note segment. There are a whole lot of 4 chord songs, not to mention 3 or 2 chord songs where you could have side-by-side variations. In fact, if you stuck to triads, you could put any accidentals on the centre 4 keys.with the triads around them (or perhaps just reserve 2 keys for 'extra' notes.

The general question is how to optimally 'tile' the keygroup with appropriate notes considering the notes used, their sequence and the intent (backing, lead, both). Personally, I see the pico as an amazing, efficient, and elegant platform for this.

Very nice, I had to hit refresh in browser to get new version, looks like it cached old one.

Question, why the long list of scales like C minor, D minor, etc. Is that list cusomized to only those scales that can produce that chord? Just wondering if it is that smart.

That is very cool!!

Early on there was a lot of dialog on the usefulness of even just visualizing keyboard layouts and this is much better.

So you stepped into a little puddle of pent-up demand - thanks.

I've found that, with other instruments you spend time learning that (fixed) instrument, but with the Eigenharp, you learn music!

hmmmm, think I'll tweet that

,

Thanks! Fixed.

(imagine what my music sounds like when my typing is like that. urk)

EigenTab v1.0.4 just released.

Now has 16 keys (full Pico), includes chromatic scale and alternate keys for chords.

I've sorted the internals so its now in a good state to do Tau/Alpha keygroups, which is next on my list. Then 'all chord diagrams' for a selected root/scale combo.