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Hi Randy

Do you mean this ? If you haven't seen that, it's possible that you're looking at the 1.4 documentation which of course doesn't include it.

There's also a link in there to the User Fingerings file, which is fairly self explanatory and has both documentation linked off the main Fingerer page and details of the format in the file itself - it seems to be well enough documented that quite a few people have been playing with it.

We have now also included a setup that demonstrates it, in the new 'Experimental' section that we ship. This is a simplified version of the normal Pico Factory setup and a brief look at it will show you how to wire Fingerer into your own setups.

We haven't yet produced any tutorial material for it, but I really want to let 2.0 settle down and get some feedback from the large pool of established wind players out there before we do that as it could lead to changes for 2.1, in particular I think that we could find that some interesting techniques and fingerings might emerge in the next few months. We don't really have a high level wind player here at Eigenlabs (and I only play the harmonica so that's not that useful) to give us the confidence that we've got it right.

One thing that is missing are some nice fingering diagrams of the included fingerings that we ship. We'll probably get these done before 2.0 enters Stable, or certainly therabouts. On that note, if anyone would like to comment on the shipped Fingerings (and Robin, we've put your Sax fingering in the Factory file as 'Electric Sax', hope that's OK) then we're all ears. I know quite a few of you want to do some quite wild things with Fingerer, in the sense of the polyphonic use of it, but we're mostly concerned to get the basic use case of an established wind player using it right to start with before we start to contemplate the funky extensions too much.

This release has some improvements to Fingerer btw. They're rather invisible so they weren't included in the release notes but Fingerer can now be placed post recorders as it fully supports channels and there were a couple of nasty bugs (one of which could lead to variable and quite large latency being introduced) fixed.


John

That's fine adding my WX style fingering, I think it was mostly complete. Any news yet on the fingerer accepting 0 and negative offsets for the notes themselves and the modifiers? You can work round the problem for the main notes by adding 12.0 to all the values and knocking an octave off later.
I've got an accordion style fingering in the works that lets you pick a tonic with some keys in the right hand column of the pico, and then the left hand can add the major or minor 3rd, 5th, 7th (sorry john), etc. With the current fingerer it seems impossible to add a polyphony modifier that is below the starting note?

One thought comes to mind with reference to the electric sax layout - it requires that the keygroup upstream of it has a particular geometry (all 9 keys of the pico in 2 courses), and that the scaler is in chromatic mode. This is likely different from the factory fingerings that use a major scale and the standard pico keymap? Something to be aware of when adding the fingerer to a setup, it won't be as simple as changing the fingering in use to swap between WX and tin whistle for example.

Ok so I'm not going crazy. I've been messing around with it today, and I couldn't get a 0 offset to work. I've come up with a 2 octave saxophone fingering set, but it will be topped off once you can have the 0 offset. for future reference here it is.
For testing it was just easier to put it under the simple clarinet than a new one and swap to it. It could probably be laid out simpler, but it works for now. I took C as the starting note that everything else was adjusted from.

[pico simple clarinet]
finger 1 = open * +13.0 ;c#
finger 2 = 1,2 * +12.0 ;c
finger 3 = 1,1 * +11.0 ;b
finger 4 = 1,1 1,2 1,5 * +10.0 ;a#
finger 5 = 1,1 1,2 * +9.0 ;a
finger 6 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 * +8.0 ;g#
finger 7 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 * +7.0 ;g
finger 8 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,6 * +6.0 ;f#
finger 9 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,5 * +5.0 ;f
finger 10 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,5 1,6 * +4.0 ;e
finger 11 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,5 1,6 1,7 1,8 * +3.0 ;d#
finger 12 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,5 1,6 1,7 * +2.0 ;d
finger 13 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 2,4 1,5 1,6 1,7 2,8 * +1.0 ;c# v
finger 14 = 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,5 1,6 1,7 2,8 * +0.0 ;c v
finger 15 = 2,2 * +24.0 ;c^
finger 16 = 2,1 * +23.0 ;b^
finger 17 = 2,1 2,2 2,5 * +22.0 ;a#^
finger 18 = 2,1 2,2 * +21.0 ;a^
finger 19 = 2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 * +20.0 ;g#^
finger 20 = 2,1 2,2 2,3 * +19.0 ;g^
finger 21 = 2,1 2,2 2,3 2,6 * +18.0 ;f#^
finger 22 = 2,1 2,2 2,3 2,5 * +17.0 ;f^
finger 23 = 2,1 2,2 2,3 2,5 2,6 * +16.0 ;e^
finger 24 = 2,1 2,2 2,3 2,5 2,6 2,7 2,8 * +15.0 ;d#
finger 25 = 2,1 2,2 2,3 2,5 2,6 2,7 * +14.0 ;d^

EDIT: In Text Edit everything is in columns but that hasn't transferred through after copying and pasting.

So does the fingerer in 2.0.62-stable now force downstream scalers to use the chromatic scale? I've been playing with the pico experimental fingerer setup, and no matter what scale I put into the scaler in the clarinet rig, I can't get it to behave any differently. To make matters worse, I think that the electric sax fingering of mine that you've included in the factory fingerer setups actually wants a diatonic scaler (although it would be easy enough to re-write so that it assumes chromatic).
Interestingly the scaler in the rigs in that experimental setup are loaded with the default diatonic major scale, but the fingerer is ignoring it?

Also, there was a post here a while ago about the pitch bend ranges of audio units and how they interact with the fingerer, and I think I've encountered the same problem. The clarinet, being a native eigenD instrument works fine, but with the audio unit in the experimental setup, I can't slur more than two notes (presumably because the pitch can't be bent more than a tone). Can anyone remember what the workaround was?

In the experimental setup, the scale is driven by default from the key group, which is set to chromatic.

If you want to override it in the scaler, make sure you set the 'override' toggle in the scaler, which forces it to override the scale (and octave, etc) set in the key group and use the values set in the scaler. Normally these are used only if the key group doesn't send them.

Regarding the pitch bend, for best results you do need to increase the pitch bend range, as carvingCode mentioned. Unfortunately, its not a standard thing and some plugins can't be configured. Since we can't set the range in the plugin, we just provide a mechanism to let EigenD know how the plugin is configured. Geert did some documentation on this in the wiki:

* Configuring Audio Unit and VST Plugins

jim

We've just been discussing it. It really depends on the fingering.

We're proposing to add an optional scale to the fingering definition, which would get sent down to the scaler as a default scale, overriding the scale set in the keygroup.

I also think there may be changes we could make to the fingerer to make it more useful with different scales. At the moment, something like the sax fingering is quite specific, so I think writing them to chromatic seems sensible. Simpler fingerings with modifier keys would seem to be more friendly to different scales.

Allowing the fingerer to specify (or not specify) a scale would seem to cover both cases.

jim