Forum

Could do with better organisation of the Pico category I think, or a search, or both.. or we'll end up with lots of fragmented threads.

I'd like to see it being easy to change from major to minor scale (or any other) and/or change key while playing... at the moment it's "How strained the change from major to minor" :D

Love the idea of more wind (1.0.4 and custom pico 2), but at the moment (with my tenor sax soundfont at least) attack and volume are still key based and wind simply activates the note.

As for other ways of controlling the instrument, I'd still like to see a guitar mode with the bottom 6 keys for picking and strumming, the scroll keys moving to above those (or vanishing), the keys above that representing chord positions on incremental frets, the strip allowing you to slide the chord up and down the neck (and holding the chord you were pressing at the time that you started touching the strip. This might also serve as a 'way in' to real instruments for "guitar heroes." I'm sure there are enough guitarists in Eigenlabs to come up with a fingering they are happy with.

In terms of building on the hardware, Im not expecting an evolved Pico to be on the drawing board in a hurry so Ive just been pondering DIY additions.

I could remove the thumb stuff on the back and stick an ipod touch on there to give my thumbs something to do, and also see if the motion sensors can be used in a clever way if moving the instrument energetically.

Could also nail the pico to a plank and put some sort of multitouch device below it and use that for strumming, whilst holding the picoplank like a guitar.

One things for sure, the joy of the picos keys, especially with plucking instrument software, makes me want the alpha.

Hi Steve

We could build you a setup to use two Picos on one computer, though the overall polyphony and performance limits would be a little worse. One of the ways we make the Pico at a lower cost is to use the host computer for some of the smart DSP that the instrument keys need (and there's quite a bit of this) and this uses up some of your computers CPU. Should work fine within these limitations though. Our in house team have tried running an Alpha and Pico together and this works fine, particularly as the Alpha does all its DSP in big FPGA's onboard and doesn't load the host further as a result.

Do you have two Pico's, would you like us to build you a setup?

John

Hello,

Thanks for the detailed info - I dont have 2 pico's yet, but am seriously considering this option to tide me over whilst I wait to see if I will be able to afford an alpha in 2010. I will let you know if I get a 2nd pico and require that setup. Cheers.