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yes , alpha has more keys, 2nd ribbon and also mic input... and of course it looks very different, made of wood etc.
the keys and the software (eigend) are identical on all harps (alpha, tau,pico) - so you can do as many splits on tau, but of course it has less keys, so thats the limit.

id recommend you read about the key layout of eigenharps, so that you can see that notes are repeated, so whats seems like lots of keys does not necessarily mean a wide range - this may or may not matter dependng on your needs, and what you want to play


all have an amazing feeling, due to sensitivity.

important to note, no eigenharp has direct midi output, you need to connect it to a computer via usb - with this, the harp talks to eigend - which supports midi input,output, clock etc
it also supports hosting of vst/au for virtual instruments.

I actually have 5 hardware synths I would like to be able to control.

Dave mentioned that by default there are 2 midi outs, but if I use an 4 or 8 port midi interface in my setup is there some way to bump up the number of instruments I could support?

I'm guessing that if I can sync with Ableton then Ableton could drive all the midi instruments and I would use the Tau as the midi controller, depending on which Ableton channel I have selected. Does that sound about right??

Since I am mainly a sax/keyboard player I visualize the Tau could be my only midi controller and I could pair that up with all the things that EigenD can do, creating a very powerful composition and performance instrument.

A few more questions:

1. I'm still not clear as to if you can use the Eigenharp just as a midi controller. I'm composing in Sibelius and figure it might be a really good tool to enter notes. I'm also using Digital Performer as a DAW and it would be great if I could use the Eigenharp as my main controller for that.

2. Tell me more about the Basestation Pro. How is it better than the standard Basestation? When will it be available to the US?

3. Do I understand correctly that the Tau does not come with a breath pipe so I have to order that separately?

4. One video I saw mentions a "cello leg" that can be attached to the bottom of the instrument. I don't see that in the accessories. Is it still available?

- You can use the Eigenharp as a MIDI controller, it has a software MIDI out which is highly configurable. On a Mac this is supported by the operating system and just works, on Windows you need a third party bit of software to transport MIDI between applications. People seem to find that LoopBe (the paid version) works well.

- The Basestation Pro has additional inputs for pedals and can read continuous control expression pedals, which can be very useful. It also has a mains supply built in, so no 'Wall-Wart' is required. It is unlikely to ever be available in the US as the US has a very stupid electrical regulatory framework that is extremely expensive to comply with and subtly (as in just enough to require two sets of fees to be paid) different from Europe. If you write to us and promise to never turn it on or connect it to the mains we will send one to the US, but it is entirely at your own risk as it is not UL approved. It is fully CE tested and approved of course, which in many ways is a more stringent set of tests, but this is apparently not enough for the relevant bureaucracy. .

- Yes, you need to add the breath pipe as an accessory if you want one

- The 'Cello spike for the Tau is currently not in production. We'd like to make some more but (and this is hard to believe) we are having trouble finding one of the tools (an expensive extrusion die for aluminum) that is required. None of the people who were involved in its manufacture will own up to possessing it, which is annoying, to put it mildly. If we find it we will make another batch, but I cannot promise that that will happen soon.

I hope that helps.

John

:-) @john

Snap!

Back in the early 90's I saw Jon Anderson, from Yes and Kitaro did a very limted tour of about 5 cities. I was lucky enough to see them when they came through Seattle, Washington. I mention this because Jon was playin an instrument made by Atari called a Hotz (still available, google JImmy Hotz). It was a controller that was way ahead of it's time and allowed you to do amazing things with it. Another instrument that I actully owed for a while was a Chapman Stick. I had often thought about the idea that if you could combine these two instruments you would have possibly one of the coolest instruments on the planet.

I just found out about the Eigenharp a couple of weeks ago and there it is, better than I could have imaged. I can't wait to get hold of one!!!

Thanks for all the great information. Now as soon as I can sell 5 of my current synths and a car (seriously!!), I will be able to afford my Eigenhap.

It would seem that the flat surface of the tau has two advantages over the alpha. The first being that the fingers have less distance to travel to reach another key. As the path is in a straight line rather than a curve which is longer. And that it is conceptually easier to remember the locations of a key in a flat plane rather than in a curved plane (which is effectively 3 dimensions).

An advantage of the alpha is that it has more keys so you can play a greater range of notes without transposing down or up octaves. If the alpha had a flat surface possibly it might be easier to learn. The designers must have thought long about the layouts. I wonder why they choose a curved layout?

The radius on the Alpha keyboard was a carefully designed and corresponds to the radius produced by the ends of your fingers as you rotate your wrist. It makes the keyboard more comfortable, natural and less fatiguing to play. We spent a lot of time in the design of the Eigenharps considering RSI type injuries, which plague musicians who play lot. A major part of any good teacher's work is showing pupils how to avoid such injuries through good technique, and we considered it to also be a major part of designing an instrument in the first place. We trialled a lot of different radii to get to the one in use now.

The Alpha keyboard is actually a manufacturing nightmare to produce, and probably adds a good £700 to the cost of the instrument. It means we have to manufacture a very stiff curved alloy support frame, which requires a lot of expensive CNC time. The engineering requirements on this frame are high as if it's not stiff enough the keys crosstalk when played, and this causes all sorts of bad things to happen. We tried an awful lot of other (cheaper) techniques to try and produce this part (composites, plastics, etched metal epoxy laminates) before realising that CNC was the way we had to do it. After four years of experiments we were pretty sure that we'd exhausted all the other options, and luckily during that 4 years CNC had got a lot cheaper and bought it within the 'just affordable' range for the part. Nowdays it's directly machined out of a solid block of alloy, in much the same style as the Apple unibody laptop cases are today.

The radius also means that each individual course of keys has to have it's own circuit board, which adds a lot of cost on as well, both in PCB manufacture (and 24 Eigenkeys long is 2cm too long for most standard PCB process equipment, just to add inconvenience and cost) and component cost dealing with the communications between boards.

Because of these costs we made an early decision to limit the Tau design to 4 courses and make it flat. Because it's narrower we get away without the radius and it turned out surprisingly comfortable to play in the end. We'd have preferred to give it a radius, but it would have been much too expensive. You wouldn't want the Alpha to be flat, we tried that and it's not nearly as nice, it's just a bit too wide.

Oddly, the flat design ended up also having a nicely different aesthetic, one we all liked as a good contrast to the Alpha's more organic look. It also feels quite different to play, nice but in a different way to the Alpha. And as a side benefit (one that did enter the design process and encouraged us to keep working on a flat design) it can also be laid flat and played more like a piano should you wish, even along the top of an existing keyboard if a keys player wants to be able to reach for some extra expressivity without getting up.

John

Thanks for your replies on the flat surface of the Tau vs the curved surface of the Alpha. Given that the optimum surface is a curve if you are playing the instrument nearly vertically infront of you (for say a live performance). Maybe if you are learning on a Tau it would be easier to learn it flat and horizontal like a piano or computer keyboard.

A quick view of the youtube shows some tau and pico played flat. This seems good if you are in a studio (like I am) creating music. Then you can use your muscle memory with the Tau fixed in one place horizontally and you can use the same fingerings for chords in different keys.

Also you could even combine two taus to get a larger range than the Alpha in octaves. By putting one tau in front of and next to the other. A downside of this is you couldnt use the breathpipe in the factory form.

Are there any reading that have had experience with playing the tau horizontally and what were your thoughts on learning to play it this way.

My Tau came today. When I first got it I thought it was damaged because there were 3 hole punched into the box along the edge. The case looked OK when I opened it and whatever punctured the box missed the case.

I got all the software installed and began working through the tutorials.

At first I was having trouble changing from one instrument to the next. I had to push the buttons a whole bunch of times for it to work. Had the same problem every time I tried to do something with the modes. The all of a sudden everything began to work as expected. Not sure what changed, but it all seems to be working now.

Changing scales, changing instruments,

Began running scales to begin to get the fingers working so just beginning to jump on the learning curve.

I'm excited!!!