Forum

The Tau has been sold.

I think there is another (alpha) about to come up for sale (not mine).

You said: "the Eigenharp is only for a small elitist group of advanced programmer types"

It is true that the instruments attract this musical interest group, and that they are vocal with their excitement, explorations and demands. However, They are not the only interest group even if they do skew perceptions.

Indeed, I think Eigenlabs has done a good job of welcoming and supporting the technical crowd without being diverted into that niche (no matter how large, it is still a fragment of the addressable market). Hopefully both aspects of this observation will continue.

I personally find it a bit disconcerting that some of the technical crowd seem oblivious to the notion that there are other musical contexts for the instrument and that these need support too. Fortunately, these voices are few.

Larry, like you, I have several instruments I play and my Alpha gets a bit lonely at times but I do find myself coming back to it and would disagree that there are ease of use issues with playing it. Seriously, simply selecting a sound (or a few), a scale, and playing has been something I find easier than just about any other instrument I've ever picked up. (Being good at it is another issue hehehe)

What is frustrating (unless it is your interest to tinker) is the customization of setups. For me, the MIDI improvements have greatly reduced that issue but that does take me outside of eigenD and I hope that the workbench will let me to do more things natively.

@Larry, I understand that it's very easy to fall into the abyss of endless tweaking and configuration, however as @NothanNumber says, you don't have to dive into this. It's taken me more than a year actually before I starting heavily customizing my setups, even after I joined Eigenlabs I purposely didn't want to stray much from the factory setups so that I would actually learn to make music with it and learn it as an instrument within a clearly constrained canvas.

Indeed, I found that with any creative process the removal of limits is to the detriment of creativity. I think that you should have two very distinct modes of exploring the instrument, one where you force yourself not to change anything about your setups apart from the occasional expression mapping or sound. and another mode for deeper exploration. If you start mixing both up, you'll never get anything done, but that's the case for anything really. For instance when learning how to mix audio, a common advice is to never ever try out a new plugin while you're in a mixing session, only use what you know and leave the exploration for later, otherwise you just kill the flow entirely.

This is also the reason while most of the time I return to piano and strings when playing the instrument. I'm in the process of designing some new polyphonic synth sounds, but I touch those only when I know that I won't be playing more than a few bars of music.

Yes, I bought Pete's Tau. And yes, from reading his blog it looks as though he sold it due to not making the progress he felt he should. He was an early adopter, suffered software issues and found lack of documentation to be a huge problem, not unlike many others.

I've been sharply critical about lack of documentation and still feel this is a major problem for the platform. But I've received great support from Geert throughout and a few others here recently, and with improvements with MIDI out and stability of the Windows software, I decided to double down on my investment. For me, purchasing a second hand instrument was the best option to move up to one that would offer me a more complete Eigenharp experience.

To Larry, I agree with Geert and Ferdinand that sticking with Factory and/or single patches to practice is key. The other thing I've started to do recently is sit down with a goal. The goal may be to fiddle around and experiment, or it may be to learn a passage in a piece, or it may be to explore a feature of the instrument. This has focused my time and my progress with the instrument has improved steadily.

One additional comment: stay true to your own musical interests. The instrument, coupled with appropriate patches can be used for virtually any musical style. Enjoy what you enjoy.

Randy

I have another alternative to suggest. I too have had a lot of difficulty trying to understand how to use the Eigenharp software and ultimately gave up, leaving my Alpha sitting in a corner for almost a year. However, some of the developers finally created an OSC agent through which it is possible to send raw data to MaxMSP and do all the processing there instead of through EigenD.

Since I already have a significant library of MaxMSP objects to manage my keyboard environment, I have started to implement control of the Eigenharp through Max. At this point I have a basic environment working and have created a few simple (and simple to understand) patchers that are letting me actually play the Alpha the way I want.

I've started writing about how it works on my blog and my library of objects can be downloaded as well. Note that this library is free and I'm not providing any kind of official support for it. I would however be interested in collaborating with people who find this approach to be of interest.

The only real downside is that anyone who wants to experiment with this approach will need to buy a copy of Max.

Enjoy.

Yes @keyman. I totally agree. Spend time on your practice setup to create some sounds that inspire you and put you in that warm fuzzy place.

The one thing I just started to do is to actually try to learn some material that has been inspirational to me and that I know well. Having it come to life on the eigenharp is really helping me connect again.

There's probably a thousand tips like this to keep moving yourself forward. We probably need a dedicated thread for this. It's an important topic.

@carvingcode... Actually, it would make a good WIKI section.

It should start with your comment about staying true to your musical interests - a great point

Ah, that sounds like we might have a bug in our website code. We had to change the Wiki to be a bit more selective, disabling access to a couple of sections for most users a few months ago, and its probable that this is set too wide for some reason. I'll look into it and come back to you.

The reason we had to make several bits restricted is that the application tooltips and online documentation (which is growing steadily) are now pulled straight out of the Wiki at build time - there's a bit of supporting markup and an idiom that needs to be followed religiously for that to work and errors break the distribution (usually silently unfortunately). For that reason we decided that the 'EigenD Reference' and a couple of other sections ought to be 'staff write only' for now, but this should only be for those bits. It's a nice way to keep the application documentation consistent and edited in one place but it was quite awkward to implement so we've probably just messed something up.

Apologies for the inconvenience - I'll get back to you later in the week once we've had a chance to take a look.

John