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Hi Paul,

Thanks for your interest in the Eigenharp, I'm sure other people will chime in but I'm already going to respond to some of your technical questions.

I've been using the Eigenharp live in a variety of settings, so have other people here, you can find some videos even online. Setting up just the Eigenharp is actually pretty simple since you save everything beforehand in a setup file that is loaded by the EigenD software. This can be launched at computer startup, so you can really just start the computer, plug in the Eigenharp and not have to do anything else besides connecting your audio interface to a powered amp, front of house mixer, ...

The EigenD software has been very stable for me for quite a long time now (but I'm part of the team that develops it, so I might be biased ;-)). I am using it regularly live though and even have started using EigenD for playing guitar live with software effects, replacing other more known software like MainStage and Bidule. When there are crashes, they mostly occur when loading some AU/VST plugins, but that's something you see beforehand at practice and you'll know which plugins are not stable. Sadly there's not a lot we can do about that since the stability and bugs of those plugins are out of our hands. We have spent many months making sure that we're as compatible as possible and continue to do so.

The Eigenharp supports MIDI out and in very well and you can totally customise which MIDI messages correspond to which expression on the Eigenharp. I'm using it with my iPad and with my Moog Slim Phatty all the time. The latency is very good, but there is obviously some. It's far lower than what I can notice though. It mostly depends on the quality of your MIDI interface and how it handles jitter. I've been using MOTU MIDI interfaces and they work really well, I found the M-Audio Midisport interfaces had some timing problems though.

You can sample external synths and create dedicated Soundfont 2 files that can be played directly with the Eigenharp without using any AU/VST plugins. EigenD (the Eigenharp software) has a SF2 sample player that supports per-note expression, meaning that you can really get a lot of emotion out of even simple soundfonts. Sampling your synths can be done semi-automatically with a tool called AutoSampler by Redmatica. It sadly has been bought by Apple a few months ago so you can't buy their software directly anymore, maybe you can still find a copy in some stores.

Since you can use any AU/VST plugin, you can really use any sound that exists. If you don't want to create your own SF2 files for every instrument, there's a large variety of plugins that have great strings and choirs. Again, you can totally customise how the Eigenharp's expression interacts with the AU/VST plugins, so that's what many people do to use new sounds.

You can totally redefine how the Eigenharp behaves with our tool called Workbench. It allows you to create any split you want, to tie them to other splits, to activate instruments at the same time, change tempo, scale, tonic, ... etc etc. Most of want you want is possible with the factory setups. Yes you can send different splits to different MIDI channels, but that will require a bit of rewiring in Workbench, we can help you with that.

You can save splits with one or several instruments active, as soon as you activate the split, it'll activate those instruments. You can also create something that we call 'talkers' to speak to everything in your Eigenharp setup and make them switch to different settings. This can be tied to keys on your Eigenharp, to a MIDI footpedal, ... basically anything that provides a trigger.

Hope this helps, don't hesitate if you have any other questions.


Geert
Eigenlabs Software Team

Many thanks for your answers, it's a great help.
Sadly I don't think I can afford an Alpha, so I'm tempted to rent a Tau and try it, assuming everything is ok, I'd buy that.

Time to have a think and do a little more digging for videos and books.

Thanks again!
Paul

There's really not much more that Geert and Mike haven't said. I just got back from a festival I played, on Alpha and an EWI, nothing more (except the laptop), Setup is quick and if you have a stable configuration it is not likely to crash in performance. A Tau would be similar, I'd imagine.

But I thought I'd mention that this is kind of normal, you get a setup that works before you take it out. I don't play out with unstable software.

-Paul (another one)