Forum

Well, it looks like I actually asked this question almost exactly one year ago. Which was probably the last time my Pico made it out of its box. Which is honestly brutal (but will be addressed below). John, however, provided a thorough answer to my old post, which was very gracious.

I do still absolutely need a detune feature.

There's plenty of classical (and other) music which is not in 440. I also haven't tuned any of my instruments to 440 in over 10 years.


(Eastern music? Gamelan?? Hello???)


If I'm expected to (somehow?) detune this Pico manually, the process needs to be detailed somewhere.

Some of these sounds are AUs, etc, and others are resonator-type modelling. As a result I would assume that different methods are going to need to be employed to achieve the same result.


It really does pain me to say that the Eigenharp is incredibly cumbersome to "get going". God help you if you are inspired and expect to pick this thing up and get your 'in the moment' impulses recorded for posterity.

Cryptic menus to go through, unintuitive terminology to wade through, absolutely no way to do any kind of a real "quick start" and get playing, like, now.. load this up, don't load that, adjust this, tweak that, be absolutely clueless as to why the sound you want just doesn't appear as an obvious option on start up, try to figure out where the parameters might be, maybe it's in EigenThis, maybe I should have loaded up EigenThat first, why won't this drum beat stop? (why is it even there?), where is the damn cello thing in the Eigenbrowser? (oh wait, it's not in the browser, because it makes sense to not have an instrument in the instrument browser, right?), the list goes on.

I realize that this is not the most positive post, but man.. after spending this kind of $$ I'm actually pretty pissed off with this thing.

The technology is AMAZING. The demos are AMAZING.

Real life/hands on? SERIOUSLY lacking, frustrating, and honestly, a little dejecting.


The tech in these things is so good, but if the whole zero-to-100 process doesn't get massively streamlined, I can't see how the instrument will gain a broader acceptance.

I'm a relatively big computer geek, and have been for years. But I'm way more interested in making music. I just don't have the patience or the time for this 'process'.

You need to consider how many people who play, say, guitar actually care about being luthiers. Because it's that percentage of people who are going to buy into an instrument that they have to practically program every time they turn it on.. and not only that, but who are expected to lay out further cash so as to continue to have the luxury of programming it.

In addition to this, there's the entire process of having to spend a fair bit of time learning to play the thing properly. This isn't really an unfair expectation, because every instrument involves this process. But at least I can pick up other instruments and they make noise (even unlistenable racket), immediately. Immediately. Not after 80 menus and turning off clicktracks and wondering why turning virtual knobs isn't affecting the sound, and wondering why everything sounds like a piano until I have to read manuals to memorize unmarked buttons, like....... arrrrgh......

Those options are all perfectly fine and acceptable.. for power users... but they just don't fly for musicians who want to make sounds and translate their inner music, right now.

In the year since my last post (read: since my Pico last came out of its box) I probably could have just learned how to play violin well enough for my demoing needs. Instead of looking at the Eigenharp and realizing how duped I feel from having purchased it; largely due to its unnecessary complexity in the realm of the user interface.

Until these aforementioned issues are addressed and corrected, I fear that the Eigenharp feels far more like a vehicle to showcase the technology, the apps, the menus and the techblog/gizmo posts, and infinitely less so like an instrument with the potential to satisfy the needs of a broad range of musicians in our current musical climate.

I think you may be suffering from a mismatch between your expectations when you bought your Eigenharp and the basic reality of a musical instrument of this kind. This is by no means unusual but it is an interesting and common problem. It would be nice to solve this for people in the end, but I have my doubts as to whether or not it can truly ever be made to go away, however much effort might go into it. I also doubt if the effort to do so is really a worthwhile use of resources.

That sounds like a brutal assessment, but to understand how I came to that conclusion, consider for moment one of the easiest instruments to, as you put it, 'make a noise with', the piano. I learnt the piano as a child, as many of us did, and I certainly was making some sort of noise in a day or so. After seven years of weekly lessons though, and what must have amounted to many useless hours of practice I was still just about 'making a noise' - I could play some pieces, scales etc, but had not got anywhere near competence. It took the subsequent adventure of learning the guitar to make me a musician for real, and that journey involved at least three or four thousand hours of practice before I became fluent, and many since.

This need to get the practice hours in to properly understand and play even the simplest instrument well seems to be basic. I have yet to find an instrument that provides a good shortcut. Some promise to do so, some seem initially to have done so (home organ anyone? Garageband?) but in the end it's always the same - less then a thousand hours and you are basically nowhere. This points to the issue being a human one rather than one of technology, and I think this to be the case.

The Eigenharp, being a totally new instrument and designed from the ground up to be so, did make an attempt to tackle this. It was a stupid attempt and in hindsight I regret that we tried as it was a waste of resources, but like every musician on the planet, I'd like some of those thousands of hours of practice back, and the dream of reducing them was beguiling. That attempt was the standard factory setups, which if you are wanting an unconfigurable, 'does what ot does' type of instrument (ie, like most other instruments, the guitar, piano etc) were designed to make 'just playing' easy to do. And if you are happy to 'just play' then they do that. You still need a lot of practice, but the learning of the full instrument is reduced in difficulty, time and complexity considerably. It still does require a whole load of work though, there are no shortcuts to being a good player of any instrument in reality. I note that you think there is no way to 'just get playing;. There really is, just fire up the factory setup, watch and follow the tutorials and make noise. Every time someone complains about everything being complicated I always ask how much time they have spent actually doing that, and it is nearly always less than a few hours, sometimes less then a couple. I really don't know what to say at that point. What did you expect, to not have to do any practice? It's a completely new instrument, practice requirements are going to actually be greater than normal if you're already a musician, because it does things in new ways that you are not used to. Interestingly I have noticed that children seem to get on a whole lot better in the first twenty hours than adult musicians, which tends to confirm this. Adults, particularly existing musicians, basically just complain that it's not magic, that it's too confusing and 'why can't I just to X?'. Children just get on and learn to play, the complexity for them is just not there.

This difficulty that existing musicians experience is exacerbated considerably when they already have an idea of what they want the instrument to do. There is nothing wrong with having such an idea, but gaining enough command over an instrument to bend it properly to your will like that always involves more work and a deeper understanding. And many people don't wish to do the work. They want a checkbox that says 'make it like this' they can just tick. I guess this is a product of the 'million apps' modern world, but there are literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of of possible 'make it like this' checkboxes that you could have, it's a consequence of creativity. We can't do that. Your particular issue (wanting to detune the instrument) is an interesting case. It's actually possible (though very fiddly) to make scales at any kind of tuning you want, but you want a global 'detune knob'. We don't have one of those, and since you are only the second person ever to ask, out of thousands of players, we probably won't add one any time soon. So if you want to play with detuned scales then you're going to need to learn how to do that, which is going to take you a few tens of hours of work. If you wanted to do that with a Steinway (or worse, a Wurlitzer electric piano, tuned with a soldering iron and razor blade, the thought makes me shudder), do you think it would be any different? What makes you think it's easier here? The Eigenharp doesn't work like Garageband, not even slightly, so doing some things in software is much tougher while other things are much easier. It's just how it is. Your tuning desire is one of the tougher ones.

Just to be clear, you must consider that what seems like a technical process, 'configuring your Eigenharp', is, for a serious player, a part of rehearsal and performance as much as actually playing notes. This is an aspect of the instrument that is hard to learn because it is actually just hard, conceptually and knowledge hard, as well as being unfamiliar and new. Our tool to make that better, Workbench, has improved discoverability but it remains a hard thing to learn and will continue to do so because it is not possible in this universe to just inject understanding into peoples heads at a distance. They have to do some work. Think of it like learning music theory. Just for playing notes it's not relevant, and you can be an OK player without it, but for many things but you need it and to be good, you always need some.

The Eigenharp enables a whole lot of meta levels of playing (may of which are as yet unexplored and represent fascinating new musical territories) and adapting the playing environment to each piece to support this is also a part of playing the instrument at a higher level. You cannot learn this without extensive practice and if you do not wish to devote the time to that then I'm afraid there is no fix.

I apologise for this long and mildly ill mannered rant. I have personally really tired of this particular complaint, particularly as I feel it carries little validity. Learning something as complex, expressive and versatile at an Eigenharp is hard, and it turns out that the old, old tradeoff between ease of learning and expressivity was not suspended for us, or for you, however hard we tried to make it so. If you want a simple instrument that you can get to grips with easily and play without having to do much practice then you really should sell your Pico and buy something else. I'm not sure quite what would fulfill that need, maybe someone else here has a useful suggestion? Whatever you do, please don't leave it gathering dust in a box.


John


PS: I note that this post came about because you wanted a solo violin or viola AU. As far as I'm aware there isn't one that's worth the time of day, though I'd be happy to corrected on that. This is partly simply because MIDI is no good for that kind of thing, it's hard to shoehorn enough expression into an AU.

The 'Cello model in EigenD can make a decent viola sound, and I seem to remember that there is a convolution (impulse response) of a Viola body somewhere out there that works quite well with it. I'd love to have a good violin model working with EigenD but there are no good impulse responses available as far as I'm aware. Getting some nice Viol family impulses responses made is an ambition for Eigenlabs at some point in the future.

I'll avoid repeating the other responses although I agree with them.

I've spent years trying out all sorts of instruments and not found any that are pick it up and play it. The closest was the pico using the default setup and starting with the piano sound. Anything that has any configurability presents the need to learn about that aspect and the eigenharps, having the richest configurability I know of, are challenging to master but rich in your options (note the word option - if you do not like it, don't do it). You do know you can set up any arbitrary tuning btw, right?

I'm NOT technical but it really did not require much to figure out how to configure the eigenharp to my needs. Others have gon much deeper than I ever will (or could). I've learned that when someone says "yes you can do that' I should hear "One can do that with the required knowledge and effort" and reflect on my actual interest in doing it.

This is not limited to electronic music either. Traditional instruments also have configuration to be done and it is often not optional (setting up a guitar comes to mind as a common example ignored by many to their detriment)

At any rate; On string plugins:

There are a few plugins that are ok in a mix or with a liberal dab of reverb. One is:
http://www.kirkhunterstudios.com/products.html

I have the solo strings Kontakt version and Ferdinand Strixner was very helpful in getting it set up.

East/West products RA and Silk also have some interesting ethnic strings

Working with sounds is just part of the territory and doing so isn't specific to eigenharp.

The aus mentioned above are good examples of the issue. It has been highly developed for users of a MIDI keyboard so, while it has various string-like ornamentations programmed in they quickly become tedious. The good news is that you don't need to learn how to play the ornamentations (or even know much about them in the first place). The bad news is that they are not particularly musical and just play out over and over. RA has some spectacular, ethnically correct bits but you need to use them sparingly and if you actually wanted to play them get ready for some heavy investment in studying them.

The adaptation of plugins to an eigenharp (if you want to go that way) is basically to turn them (the automations) all off and attach controls to parameters so you can actually play you want. You need to dig into Kontakt (or other plugin) to do this and, more importantly, you need to know what result you want and how to play to get the desired results. Doing the setup is the least of your challenges.