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Tau: How do I setup the chromatic horizontal 3xn scale

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written by: NothanUmber

I wouldn't write off the "right to left, top to bottom" 3xn layout as it is set up by Technobear's Creator atm.
The difference between left to right and right to left orientation is just what you plan to mainly focus on with which hand: Right to left slightly favors the right hand for scales and the left hand for chord shapes. With left to right it's the opposite way around:

Assume the right to left orientation:
There you have the nice property of having two whole tone scales going from left to right diagonally downwards - which is nice to play with your right hand. This is very nice for playing diatonic scales (major, minor etc.) by just switching from one whole tone scale to the other for the half-tone steps in the target scale.
E.g. a major scale would look like this:

C _ _
_ D _
_ F E
_ _ G
_ _ _ A
_ _ _ C H


or compressed to three columns (so it's isomorphic for Alpha):
C _ _
_ D _
_ F E
A _ G
C H _

For 3xn you have three "starting keys" for each scale and chord that result in 2-3 different scale and chord shapes to choose from. (On Alpha the 3xn layout is fully isomorphic, what means that you can choose all these shapes for all tonalities. For Tau some shapes are not available for some tonalities, so you usually have to use the one shape that exists).

For right to left orientation I would suggest to start with the leftmost key of the 3xn block as "goto-root key" for the right hand and the rightmost key for the left hand which results in these chromatic key numberings:

Right hand:

01
04 03 02
07 06 05
10 09 08
13 12 11

Left hand:

03 02 01
06 05 04
09 08 07
12 11 10
__ __ 13

That variant has the disadvantage that you have to learn two shapes for the two hands. But these are usually more comfortable then because you can stretch the fingers that play notes above the base note instead of "angling" them - what I find more comfortable in many cases.
But sometimes there are chords from the "right hand position" that are even more comfortable for the left hand and the other way around. (e.g. you could think about using the major and minor triad shape from the left hand also for right hand etc.)

I have been practicing with this layout for the last two weeks and think about making it my new "goto layout", finally starting with serious practicing.
Especially the isomorphic nature is *so* cool for Alpha - on piano I usually jump around a lot between tonalities and this is so easy with that layout if you "got" the shapes once. Range is ok, scales, chord shapes and arpeggios are ok, too for both hands. It's just very different from standard layout, so you have to completely relearn (which is not the case for e.g. 4xn horizontal that shares a lot of shapes - just turned by 90 degrees). But that's ok for me at this point.

written by: Greg

Sat, 5 Oct 2013 14:07:44 +0100 BST

Dear Eigenharp users

Can you please help with some directions to create the 'chromatic horizontal 3xn layout' for the Tau.

I really like this layout. I am assuming i need to type some lines into the Belcanto at the EigenCommander command line. I am not sure what these lines are.

Thanks Greg


written by: jaself

Wed, 9 Oct 2013 00:17:06 +0100 BST

There is more than one horizontal 3n layout, depending on whether it starts at the top or bottom and left or right.

If you can visit the G+ Eigenharp community, you will find a discussion on this from a few days ago with examples and links. Technobear posted some Belcanto scripts there (generated from his setup Creator utility) that you can download and execute to try a couple of variations. Basically these modify the course offsets and musical mapping for keygroup 1.

The Belcanto lines are pretty long. I had difficulty getting them to execute correctly in EigenCommander, but eventually succeeded using brpc after troubleshooting in Workbench. I don't know why they would work in one and not the other.

If you have Workbench, you can edit keygroup 1 and copy/paste or type just the values for course offsets and musical mapping into the appropriate slots. Workbench also has a mapping editor that is easier to work with than typing mappings into the form. I found it useful for debugging the original scripts, before I discovered brpc.

Anyway here is Belcanto for a Tau musical mapping - horizontal starting from top left (modified from one of Technobear's posted examples because top left orientation makes more sense to me).

keygroup 1 hey musical mapping to [ [[1,1],[1,1]], [[1,2],[2,1]], [[1,3],[3,1]], [[1,4],[4,1]], [[1,5],[5,1]], [[1,6],[6,1]], [[1,7],[7,1]], [[1,8],[8,1]], [[1,9],[9,1]], [[1,10],10,1]], [[1,11],[11,1]], [[1,12],[12,1]], [[1,13],[13,1]], [[1,14],[14,1]], [[1,15],[15,1]], [[1,16],[16,1]], [[1,17],[1,2]], [[1,18],[2,2]], [[1,19],[3,2]], [[1,20],[4,2]], [[1,21],[5,2]], [[1,22],[6,2]], [[1,23],[7,2]], [[1,24],[8,2]], [[1,25],[9,2]], [[1,26],[10,2]], [[1,27],[11,2]], [[1,28],[12,2]], [[1,29],[13,2]], [[1,30],[14,2]], [[1,31],[15,2]], [[1,32],[16,2]], [[1,33],[1,3]], [[1,34],[2,3]], [[1,35],[3,3]], [[1,36],[4,3]], [[1,37],[5,3]], [[1,38],[6,3]], [[1,39],[7,3]], [[1,40],[8,3]], [[1,41],[9,3]], [[1,42],[10,3]], [[1,43],[11,3]], [[1,44],[12,3]], [[1,45],[13,3]], [[1,46],[14,3]], [[1,47],[15,3]], [[1,48],[16,3]], [[1,49],[17,1]], [[1,50],[18,1]], [[1,53],[1,4]], [[1,54],[2,4]], [[1,55],[3,4]], [[1,56],[4,4]], [[1,57],[5,4]], [[1,58],[6,4]], [[1,59],[7,4]], [[1,60],[8,4]], [[1,61],[9,4]], [[1,62],[10,4]], [[1,63],[11,4]], [[1,64],[12,4]], [[1,65],[13,4]], [[1,66],[14,4]], [[1,67],[15,4]], [[1,68],[16,4]], [[1,69],[17,2]], [[1,70],[18,2]]] set

Here is Belcanto modifying course offsets for Tau 3n layout with horizontal left-to-right musical mapping (this is slightly different from offsets for the right-to left layouts due to the not-exactly-a-rectangle keyboard shape):

keygroup 1 hey course offset to [0.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,3.0,5.0,3.0] set

Here is Belcanto for Tau 4n layout adjusted to put the root in long column 3 (necessary to make root scales (i.e. C-Major and C-Minor) nicely playable on Tau)

keygroup 1 hey course offset to [-2,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,6,4] set

There is documentation on Keygroup and Course in the wiki, though not thoroughly up-to-date and no mention that I can find there of the new Belcanto array formats above. There is other Belcanto there, however (I had forgotten) for adjusting course mapping and offsets in smaller steps.

None of the above Belcanto lines seem to execute correctly for me in EigenCommander, but they work fine in a script file or in a Mac command line, for instance (replace curly brackets below with angle brackets:

/usr/pi/release-2.0.74-stable/bin/brpc '{interpreter1}' exec keygroup 1 hey course offset to [-2,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,6,4] set


written by: jaself

Wed, 9 Oct 2013 04:20:31 +0100 BST

Here is an older style Belcanto script for a horizontal 3n layout. You can copy/paste it (everything below "script") into EigenCommander and run it there. If you copy/paste it (everything from "name" down) into a text file (for example, tau3topright.txt) and save that into your ~/Library/Eigenlabs/Scripts directory, you can run it from EigenCommander with Belcanto "empty join tau sideways top left interval 3 execute".

name
tau sideways top left interval 3
description
tau 3n Layout - older style belcanto
top down, left-to-right

script
empty join
keygroup 1 listen
musical clear
course 1 key 1 to course 1 key 1 add
course 1 key 2 to course 2 key 1 add
course 1 key 3 to course 3 key 1 add
course 1 key 4 to course 4 key 1 add
course 1 key 5 to course 5 key 1 add
course 1 key 6 to course 6 key 1 add
course 1 key 7 to course 7 key 1 add
course 1 key 8 to course 8 key 1 add
course 1 key 9 to course 9 key 1 add
course 1 key 10 to course 10 key 1 add
course 1 key 11 to course 11 key 1 add
course 1 key 12 to course 12 key 1 add
course 1 key 13 to course 13 key 1 add
course 1 key 14 to course 14 key 1 add
course 1 key 15 to course 15 key 1 add
course 1 key 16 to course 16 key 1 add

course 1 key 17 to course 1 key 2 add
course 1 key 18 to course 2 key 2 add
course 1 key 19 to course 3 key 2 add
course 1 key 20 to course 4 key 2 add
course 1 key 21 to course 5 key 2 add
course 1 key 22 to course 6 key 2 add
course 1 key 23 to course 7 key 2 add
course 1 key 24 to course 8 key 2 add
course 1 key 25 to course 9 key 2 add
course 1 key 26 to course 10 key 2 add
course 1 key 27 to course 11 key 2 add
course 1 key 28 to course 12 key 2 add
course 1 key 29 to course 13 key 2 add
course 1 key 30 to course 14 key 2 add
course 1 key 31 to course 15 key 2 add
course 1 key 32 to course 16 key 2 add

course 1 key 33 to course 1 key 3 add
course 1 key 34 to course 2 key 3 add
course 1 key 35 to course 3 key 3 add
course 1 key 36 to course 4 key 3 add
course 1 key 37 to course 5 key 3 add
course 1 key 38 to course 6 key 3 add
course 1 key 39 to course 7 key 3 add
course 1 key 40 to course 8 key 3 add
course 1 key 41 to course 9 key 3 add
course 1 key 42 to course 10 key 3 add
course 1 key 43 to course 11 key 3 add
course 1 key 44 to course 12 key 3 add
course 1 key 45 to course 13 key 3 add
course 1 key 46 to course 14 key 3 add
course 1 key 47 to course 15 key 3 add
course 1 key 48 to course 16 key 3 add

course 1 key 53 to course 1 key 4 add
course 1 key 54 to course 2 key 4 add
course 1 key 55 to course 3 key 4 add
course 1 key 56 to course 4 key 4 add
course 1 key 57 to course 5 key 4 add
course 1 key 58 to course 6 key 4 add
course 1 key 59 to course 7 key 4 add
course 1 key 60 to course 8 key 4 add
course 1 key 61 to course 9 key 4 add
course 1 key 62 to course 10 key 4 add
course 1 key 63 to course 11 key 4 add
course 1 key 64 to course 12 key 4 add
course 1 key 65 to course 13 key 4 add
course 1 key 66 to course 14 key 4 add
course 1 key 67 to course 15 key 4 add
course 1 key 68 to course 16 key 4 add

course 1 key 49 to course 17 key 1 add
course 1 key 50 to course 18 key 1 add
course 1 key 69 to course 17 key 2 add
course 1 key 70 to course 18 key 2 add


course 1 offset to 0 interval set
course 2 offset to 3 interval set
course 3 offset to 3 interval set
course 4 offset to 3 interval set
course 5 offset to 3 interval set
course 6 offset to 3 interval set
course 7 offset to 3 interval set
course 8 offset to 3 interval set
course 9 offset to 3 interval set
course 10 offset to 3 interval set
course 11 offset to 3 interval set
course 12 offset to 3 interval set
course 13 offset to 3 interval set
course 14 offset to 3 interval set
course 15 offset to 3 interval set
course 16 offset to 3 interval set
course 17 offset to 5 interval set
course 18 offset to 3 interval set


written by: NothanUmber

Sun, 13 Oct 2013 14:13:24 +0100 BST

I wouldn't write off the "right to left, top to bottom" 3xn layout as it is set up by Technobear's Creator atm.
The difference between left to right and right to left orientation is just what you plan to mainly focus on with which hand: Right to left slightly favors the right hand for scales and the left hand for chord shapes. With left to right it's the opposite way around:

Assume the right to left orientation:
There you have the nice property of having two whole tone scales going from left to right diagonally downwards - which is nice to play with your right hand. This is very nice for playing diatonic scales (major, minor etc.) by just switching from one whole tone scale to the other for the half-tone steps in the target scale.
E.g. a major scale would look like this:

C _ _
_ D _
_ F E
_ _ G
_ _ _ A
_ _ _ C H


or compressed to three columns (so it's isomorphic for Alpha):
C _ _
_ D _
_ F E
A _ G
C H _

For 3xn you have three "starting keys" for each scale and chord that result in 2-3 different scale and chord shapes to choose from. (On Alpha the 3xn layout is fully isomorphic, what means that you can choose all these shapes for all tonalities. For Tau some shapes are not available for some tonalities, so you usually have to use the one shape that exists).

For right to left orientation I would suggest to start with the leftmost key of the 3xn block as "goto-root key" for the right hand and the rightmost key for the left hand which results in these chromatic key numberings:

Right hand:

01
04 03 02
07 06 05
10 09 08
13 12 11

Left hand:

03 02 01
06 05 04
09 08 07
12 11 10
__ __ 13

That variant has the disadvantage that you have to learn two shapes for the two hands. But these are usually more comfortable then because you can stretch the fingers that play notes above the base note instead of "angling" them - what I find more comfortable in many cases.
But sometimes there are chords from the "right hand position" that are even more comfortable for the left hand and the other way around. (e.g. you could think about using the major and minor triad shape from the left hand also for right hand etc.)

I have been practicing with this layout for the last two weeks and think about making it my new "goto layout", finally starting with serious practicing.
Especially the isomorphic nature is *so* cool for Alpha - on piano I usually jump around a lot between tonalities and this is so easy with that layout if you "got" the shapes once. Range is ok, scales, chord shapes and arpeggios are ok, too for both hands. It's just very different from standard layout, so you have to completely relearn (which is not the case for e.g. 4xn horizontal that shares a lot of shapes - just turned by 90 degrees). But that's ok for me at this point.



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