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Hi Randy (and all)

There's a 'Factory Fingerings' file that Fingerer reads before it reads 'User Fingerings'. This is installed with the software. It doesn't contain any particularly interesting fingerings as yet (it where the existing small list of experimental fingerings are from) but it is intended to have a selection of 'official' fingerings in there in time. The manual page shows you how to select from them, either using Workbench or Belcanto.

Not being a wind player I'm probably not the best person to figure out how to translate the Boehm system onto a Pico (not to mention the fact that the first time I met the Boehm system while I was researching this stuff I nearly fell off my chair laughing - its a bloody miracle anyone makes noise at all with brass and woodwind in my opinion). It looks like 0beron has made a great start on a Sax fingering adaptation of the WX5 Sax B, and I'm sure a little experimentation by players will soon flush out the stuff that works and that that doesn't.

There are two main things to figure out in fingerings. The first are some nice comfortable ones for existing wind players (like the simple Tin Whistle that I've already defined, but suitable for Sax and Clarinet players). A Boehm system analogue is one of these. The second thing will be some more native, Eigenharp fingerings, fingerings which explore the power of the instrument and the keys. There are so many possibilities when one is cut free from the restrictions of physics and resonating tubes that it does get a bit daunting to think about. The really interesting things come when you begin to consider the transitions between notes. The way these behave informs an awful lot about the way that traditional players interact with their instruments. We have that to figure out all over again, but with a much higher degree of freedom in the implementation, freedom that comes with the price of having to really think about it.

On a slightly more prosaic note, please remember that this is a first, experimental release of Fingerer and it is likely to change some between now and when it's finished. I'd just like to raise a minor note of caution - please don't invest huge amounts of time fine tuning (I'm looking at you Steve!) something right now - there may well be changes that break your creation coming up (sorry to bang on but its still experimental) and judging by all the food for thought I'm being given in under 24 hours, I think that to be quite likely. So please go mad and experiment - the more the better, but please don't get upset when I change it all some next week.

On that note, please keep the experimental fingerings coming. And to the existing wind players out there, I'm really interested in anything you do to emulate traditional instruments - this is the main thing I'm interested in getting right next, as it's a hygiene factor for Fingerer, it has to be right. All the fun stuff is also good, but the basic fingering thing has to be right, so I'm probably going to be concentrating a bit more on that than all the polyphony and groovy stuff, to start with..

John

Fear not, I know its bleeding edge stuff. Most of the time Im investing in it is part of a wider agenda of mine to learn Workbench anyway, so I won't cry if something changes and I have to rethink it all again in future. Plus I have a worst-case fallback of being able to resort to using external software systems via OSC if your future direction for this agent goes in a direction that is incompatible with my plans.

This stuff is especially fun for me because I never learnt how to play any other instrument, I have an EWI wind controller but I never learnt the fingering. I understand some music theory and how a range of software instruments and DAWs work, but I can't read musical notation and half the terminology never sunk in for me. This leads to many challenges, but also a nice blank sheet of paper that I can write on without too many preconceptions about how instruments should work. And there are all the wonderful people here experimenting and talking about there experiences, which I can use to supplement my knowledge.

So yay, this year its not so much mothers day as mothers of invention day :D

@NothanUmber

The Polyphony modfiers already behave like that, they are independent of the fingering patterns, so keys can be in both. There isn't any kind of modal behaviour (and I think that would be very confusing personally) to re-purpose keys on the fly but you should be able to include a polyphony key as a pattern key and have a polyphonic pattern in that way. I haven't tried that though, does it not work?

John

Another thing that comes to mind when playing with the WX5 fingering, it would be nice to be able to configure the key activation thresholds on a key by key basis, or at least to set different thresholds for the playing keys vs the modifiers. The slides between notes work really well on the playing keys, but with octave modifiers the note is really unstable when you use the default threshold of 0.1. (It's insane - you can actually hear the tremors in the muscles of you finger - score another one for the eigenkey design!). What might work well is to be able to set an activation threshold, and then trigger a slide to the next octave (or whatever interval you set for the modifer), but for the slide to be of fixed length and quite short. The playing keys can be left as they are, the slides are brilliant, now I have something that combines the flexibility and easy fingering combinations of the WX5 with the expressivity of the chieftan whistles I play where you can slide the notes by rolling your finger off the holes gradually.

I think the responsiveness issue is easier to trigger when playing staccato, or at least when triggering new notes at roughly the same time as moving your fingers. If you start blowing, and then wiggle your fingers around it follows along all the time, but if you re-trigger the breath pipe all the time some of the fingering changes get lost somewhere along the way.

I know John already has the WX charts, and the Akai ones are above. For completeness, here are the WX charts:

http://www.patchmanmusic.com/wx5info.html

They are also on pg32+ of this doc
http://www2.yamaha.co.jp/manual/pdf/emi/english/synth/WX5E.PDF

Here a screenshot of what I currently use as a simple test setup.

Regarding the note stuck issue and reproducing it, if its got anything to do with my experience so far, then I strongly recommend hooking the output of the scaler that goes after the fingerer to a midi output and then having a quick look at what midi is being sent. Im consistently seeing the base note getting stuck on in my DAW, and its really difficult to get it to go off. To get it to go off seems to be an issue of timing, I have to rapidly change the breath input to the fingerer at the same time as letting go of the appropriate key, I assume in the vague hope that these two hit 0 at the same time, which then seems to send a midi message that finally switches off the base note.

I suggest using midi to look at this issue for several reasons, mostly because the problem is not so apparent if you are using a soft instrument where the audible sound is not sustained even if the note carries on being pressed. And also because if your soft instrument is sensitive to pressure/note velocity, then you may not notice a note still playing because of how quiet it is due to last being updated at a time of very low breath input. But its still there, even after breath input has fallen to nothing.

Now it would be quite understandable to assume that its just my wacky setup that is causing this, but I've tried cutting a lot of wires in workbench and it doesn't stop a sticky base note getting through very consistently. I would have waited longer and done a few more setups before making this post, but a few things other people are saying gives me cause to think that I just might be right. Things such as the way some people only have it working with one sort of soft instrument, and even Johns comment about seeing something similar in the past and putting it down to a clogged breath pipe. It could be that the actions you performed to clear the pipe happened to clear the note because of co-incidental timing of when a 0 breath signal was received at the same moment as letting go of the relevant keys, so that particular stuck note went away, but not because the breath input fell to 0 for the first time due to declogging, because it fell to 0 at just the right time.

Of course I may be barking up the wrong tree but as I was lucky enough to stumble past soft instruments that mask this possible issue I thought I would share my experience as if Im not bonkers then I've met the issue head on, i.e. its happening with every single note I play with a fingerer of any kind. And I don't think my setup has a fault which would allow non-fingerer key presses to leak through to the midi output, although I should look again just in case.

Anyways despite this interesting issue I am having so much fun with this stuff, and I've only just started editing the actual fingerer settings. My strumming thing works, and it feels good, now the hard work of actually making it generate the right notes begins :D

Aha, now that I have started to play with the fingerer user text file setups I am starting to see two different kinds of stuck notes. One sort can be cleared if you release the key at any point before stopping breath, the other can only be cleared in the tricky way I mentioned in previous post. Investigating the variable that determines which sort of stick happens, in the hope this will shed light on the culprit.

Cheers. I tried again with a much simpler setup in workbench last night and I still got the same thing. Let me know if you have trouble reproducing it and I'll look into the detail again. As best I can tell the sticking was harder to remove for a fingerer setup like 'programmer' than it was for something like 'pico grey', but I didn't quite get as far as to establish the logic as to why.

On a possibly vaguely related note what is the strummer agent supposed to do?