MusicScienceGuy

The Novation Launchpad and the Harmonic Table

One of the gratifying things about writing Wikipedia articles is that rarely some one actually reads them. Really, really rarely, someone makes use of them. This seems to have been the case for the interesting Novation Launchpad ($200), a flashy (literally) midi controller developed by Novation and AbleTon. 

Launchpad

The culprit is, I believe, Zander, who has created a very nice blogsite here.  Among many other things he has done is written software to make this flexible little controller into a not-half-bad sonome, what he calls a launchpad-harmonic-table-controller . This is great, as to do this, he has to have read this article on the thing. I'm quite frankly amazed.

Of course, being adapted from a midi controller with a rectangular geometry and without velocity sensitivity, its not the perfect sonome, just as making a chisel from a flat-blade screwdriver might not be perfect, but the thing works and not too badly, as you can see here.

If you have a Launchpad, this is a good way to try out the harmonic table system. Ask Zander.

Ken.

Virtual instruments for an alternate keyboard

One thing you really need for your instrument is a virtual instrument sound pack. The built-in midi sounds that go along with the windows sound engine are OK for practice, but they are the musical equivalent of plastic cutlery.  By the way, although the Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth sounds a bit better than the basic Microsoft Synthesizer, it seemed to introduce a surprising amount of latency and problems on my Acer D250 netbook. Be warned: do not use it. 

Jammer vision Virtual Instrument

 The one I use and currently recommend is Garritan Personal Orchestra (GPO), in its latest incarnation with the new ARIA sound engine. I do not recommend anything to do with the Kontakt product line they used to use. The Kontakt products, while I’m sure they have their good points, are complicated to use, finicky to set up, and have fussy preferences. I found it and the old GPO to be real time burners. The old package was also quite pricey. The Aria sound engine loads much faster too.

The new GPO/Aria is now better priced, at a $150 for a new version, and the upgrade price is a decent $50. If you have the old GPO and didn’t use it for the reasons above, I suggest trying the new one.

Now, many of the orchestral sounds don’t work that well with a keyboard – the keyboard, having only velocity as a expression variable, produces a flat sounding trumpet, violin etc. For these instruments two work well, one will need a thumb control. I tried it briefly (using the pap on a Korg Nanopad, and was able to play a not-too-crude version of Taps. Time didn’t allow me to delve deeper, but perhaps next year I will "learn to play the trumpet". These reservations aside, the piano, harpsichord, harp and like instruments are very good in this pack.

The Aria sound engine loads much faster, and has:

• A default configuration you can set (only one, alas)
• It can be loaded at startup, with a default set of instruments
• Does not clog up my computers – to check this, you can use DPC Latency Checker to check the latency
•  Meshes with ASIO drivers, at least with Creative sound cards and ASIO4ALL on HP netbooks

The Songsmith Analog Synthesizer pack 1 is also decent. At $10 it delivers quite a few cool organ (and some truly weird) sounds to use when one gets bored with the sounds of an orchestra.  

I use now GPO and the Synth pack on my HP netbook just for practice.  To use, I set it to:

• Load right at system startup
• default to reading input from LoopBE
• use either the  MME and the ASIO drivers: these seem to work with low latency, (not DirectSound)
• To set, go to Tools => Preferences
• You may also want to turn off reverb, whcih they have on by default (Effects => Ambience button)

Then I load the little Max/MSP program  called Axis Tweaker (again at startup) that takes the Axis-49 input and makes the Axis work the way I want (with key remapping, velocity curve  tweaking etc.)  Note: the Axis has to be plugged in before Tweaker loads – most midi applications are funny this way.The basic idea is to turn the machine on, plug in headphones or speakers, and be ready to go in half a minute, all without thinking about anything other than music.

This setup is not perfect – I’d really like it if Aria would accept input parameters (in the shortcuts) so it could be loaded with different things by clicking on customized shortcuts.

I would also wonder why they only allow it to read the midi input stream, and not the midi output stream as well. That would allow us to skip using LoopBE to divert the tweaker output back to the input stream, an extra fiddle.

The Axis Tweaker program I plan to enhance to make it very much more powerful. It will become an instrument integration system, which will integrate several keyboards, controllers and the PC keyboard into a single virtual instrument, using simple configurable table files and assignable buttons on the PC keyboard and/or whatever controller one chooses. 

Doubtless there are better virtual instruments out there - if you know of them, please let us know! But GPO is more good enough for now.

 

The Wikipedia blues - updated

I’ve had an interesting dust-up (slang for “polite little fight”), with of all people, the Wikipedia culture.

Sonome Deletion

It’s been aggravating, time-consuming and a big red alert to anyone that wants to contribute to the famous repository.

 

You may recall that I decided to try to add a bit of formality and order to the little world of alternate keyboards that is my interest by writing a series of inter-connected articles. These turned out to be:

Isomorphic Keyboard	Using key layout …	Inventor / promoter
Jammer keyboard & Thummer keyboard	Wicki-Hayden	Jim Plamondon
Sonome keyboard	Harmonic Table	Peter Davies (Inventor)

 

You can see, I hope, the logic behind the approach: describe the instrument and its quirks, then deal with the layout as a thing on its own just as a piano, organ and a harpsichord share the same layout. And lastly, describe the inventor / promoter and his ... good points? 

Note that world-wide there are probably at least several thousand people that might be interested in the subjects of these articles (some people are just as crazy as me). With them posted in Wikipedia, perhaps a tenth, several hundred of these might stumble in and be informed. So this was my little contribution to the world of knowledge.

Now, the jammer/Thummer keyboard concept has been out there a fairly long time (5 years!), and is thus richly talked about – Jim Plamondon is a good salesman, with a clear vision that he broadcast far and wide.

Conversely, while the sonome invention goes back into prehistory to the first 1991 prototype, the terms sonome and harmonic table has not been widely mooted about:  the inventor is a busy man. There’s nothing wrong with them: but different people used different terms, like melodic table, triad arrangement and even the oddly capitalized AXiS (I kid you not). I contacted the interested parties and got everyone to agree on the terms, factoring in things like existing popularity and possible confusion with other uses. The terms axis and triad, for example, have way too many other possible meanings and associations.

I wrote a starter draft of the articles, had people review and enhance them, and when I felt it was solid, went live on Wikipedia. Once live in Wikipedia, interest increased, and a bunch more edits ensued. After a month it all stabilized. I personally noticed that various blog postings took a leap up in the terminology used – everyone was using the same terms, and all seemed more informed. 

“Hey! That took piles of time but was worthwhile” was my concluding thought. I started to ponder extending the Wikipedia articles to cover other alternate keyboards, and to perhaps tidy up the whole micro-area of knowledge a bit at a time. All was good.

The Notability Shark circles

It all started with the biography. An instrument, an invention, does not stand just by itself. It is invented by someone, and if the instrument becomes widely popular, say in 30 years, I thought it would be useful to have a little article on the guy who started it all, an investment in prosperity so to speak. After all, it’s a tad harder to ask someone to annotate and correct a biography after they are dead, right?, especially someone who is quiet and busy.

But, being quiet translates into not appearing much in the media.

I have nominated Peter Davies (Inventor) an article that you created, for deletion.

So began a visit to the Twilight Zone, I argued, I whined, I called in help to improve the article, and found lots of interesting things about Mr. Davies – did you know he has built guitars for a who’s who of the British guitar elite? That he advised Monika (Jimi Hendrix’s fiancée) on taking care of Jimi’s guitar “Black Beauty” – and has the thank-you note to prove it?  That the Wikipedia article on the Black Beauty is therefore way incomplete?  Interesting stuff, in a micro-way. Read the gory details of the fight here: Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Peter_Davies_(inventor)

All to no avail: “No reliable sources found to establish notability of an individual.”

Poof.  The article was gone.    

But I could certainly see their point, and I had saved the article, and if, perchance, the sonome becomes wildly popular, it could be put back. I moved on.

 

The sharks return

The next day, it began again. Now Two articles were under review:  sonome keyboard and the related Harmonic Table key layout. I argued much harder this time: I contacted many people. The inventor and the manufacturers contacted more people. Arguments were made by sonome users, researchers, composers, that the articles were, by heavens, useful and clarifying!  

Nope. Useful does not equate to notable: Poof went the sonome article **

 

 I await the circling to begin, this time around my four /five  remaining little articles.

Poof went too, the other articles and work that I would have done to Wikipedia in this small sense. Before, I was mildly surprised that there were so few wiki articles on alternate instruments and micro-tonality.  Now, alas, I know why.

Now too, do I understand the warnings given to me about posting in Wikipedia, which I tried to dispel with careful research and accurate review. Alas, simple scholarship and utility is not grounds for inclusion in Wikipedia. 

The moral: don’t count on Wikipedia for useful micro-information. Their "garbage-collection" algorithm needs work.

Articles deleted from Wikipedia because they are "Not Notable"

Peter_Davies_(inventor) (saved copy) &  Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Peter_Davies_(inventor)

Sonome_keyboard (saved copy) & Articles_for_deletion/Sonome_keyboard  

Harmonic_table_note_layout

Not yet:

Jammer_keyboard  and the Thummer_keyboard

Wicki-Hayden_note_layout

 

Jim_Plamondon

Notes

Wikipedia has an ongoing Biographies of Living People (BLP) problem (of the erroneous, libelous and frivolous kind) that they need to police. The Seigenthaler Scandal was apparently the trigger that began Wikipedia’s prey-on-the-small policy. They instituted a cleanup that has apparently gone a bit beyond scope.

To mind comes Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen noted that human society sorts and discriminates among people and things long past the point where such actions have practical value, and that these “invidious distinctions” serve to create status hierarchies. I concur with Timothy Noah that Wikipedia culture is evolving to let some topics in and exclude other not because doing so is necessary nor useful to people using Wikipedia, but because doing so is part of our basic drives.

To Wikipedians: be wary of removing accurate and potentially-useful information from the permanent record based on the subjective notion of “Notability”. Jeff Atwood put it well: “The fatal flaw of deletionism is the mindset of deciding what someone else should find interesting.” 

 

**Update - only one article was deleted, the sonome keyboard article. A Wikipedian editor apparently found the Harmonic Table article interesting, or at least not meriting deletion, since he/she removed the 'article being considered for deletion' notice, then another one added good information about Euler's Tonnez. No fins have been sighted lately; perhaps I was a harsh. Time will tell.

However, It's plain that I need to move to a proper web site. This little blog is now far to confining, good information gets lost in the stack, and It is not considered "notable" by Wikipedians et al. I propose to use Google sites, as it looks like it has what I need. Working address: http://sites.google.com/site/altkeyboards/ 

I ask for help: editors and article writers/bloggers are very welcome.

 

Care and feeding of an Alternate Keyboard

Finally, we are at the end of the beginning
Although my focus is on the keyboard known as the jammer, everything I'm producing right now, keyboard-wise relates well to any kind of alternate keyboard. All alternate keyboards have, in a sense, the same needs; they are orphans in need of support, of tools that are taken for granted in the standard keyboard world.

It was hugely daunting, when I started out to learn to first build a jammer and then to play it. But now, I think that I have broken the problem down into small parts and have made inroads into every single need.

Since the same challenge is faced by every user of alternate keyboards, I'm writing these articles generically. I hope you find them truly useful.

The Big Picture

Alternate Keyboard vision

So what does this diagram mean? This is my idea of the things that a musician needs to build a custom alternate keyboard and succeed with it. I've also named products that work well - perhaps not the best - but they are all simple to use, don't cost much, and simply work without hours of fiddling.

My goal is to be able, in a couple years, when my skills catch up with my imagination, to plug it together, turn it on, play and have fun at a level far beyond what I could hope for if I was learning the piano. We're not here yet, but we are still miles ahead of where we were a year ago. 

I hope to detail a section of the diagram above each week for the next 12 weeks. Hold me to it.
Ken. 

The jammer expanded - working fully with your computer

Here's one step, a crucial one, to making an truly useful instrument from the new button-array keyboards: your midi controller needs a properly configured netbook/laptop. First, you need a loop-back engine, otherwise you computer can only do one thing to your midi input, and you need it do more.

Midi Basics - loopback

 

Per the diagram to the traditional intent of midi processing on the computer is to do just one thing: change the input to a different midi signal, or convert it to a neat sound, or perhaps teach a music lesson, but not more.

This is basically due to the ancient (in computer terms), simple original design of midi: the computer was thought of as just another instrument or musical gadget: input one thing, fix it up, and spit if out.

Midi Basics - loopback2

To fix this on, this you need a missing component, a virtual MIDI device for transferring MIDI data between midi layers/computer programs, called a midi loopback. Basically this is an "invisible cable" to connect a MIDI out-port of an application to any other application's MIDI in-port.

 

All MIDI data sent to the program's output is channeled to the receiving applications in real-time.

I recommend loopbe1, from some guys in Germany. It is very simple, installs cleanly, and detects feed back. 

It's only quirk: if you do get a feedback going, it will mute itself, and you will have to remember open the control and un-mute it. It may take a while for the light to dawn. 

There are other tools available, like Midi-Ox and Midi-yoke. These provide much more functionality and flexibility, and can help, for instance, observe midi streams: far more tool than you need.

 

Selecting a Netbook

Through the laborious reading between the lines of the details of driver updates, I found that the amazing bulk of net-books (and perhaps most low-end laptops) seem to have the Taiwanese-made Realtek sound chip.
Based on my experience and the google "RealTek midi problem" hit rate (it does not work with ASIO4All for example), I'd suggest you stay away from these if you want to use your netbook for more than simple sound output, without shelling out $100 or so for a USB-connected external sound card. 

I did find that as far as I can see the only non-Realtek sound chip units are HP, with their IDT chips. These have a better reputation, and my experience with the HP mini (VM264UA#ABC) bears this out. - DPC Latency check reports .5 to 1 millisecond latency (inside the computer), with both MM and ASIO4ALL. DirectSound is very poor. The real key-to-sound-in-the-ear latency varies but can be made decently low.

This $500 netbook works well velcroed onto an AXiS - they are the same size. The screen although tiny (I need glasses to read it) has lots of detail; enough for most full laptop work. The battery will lasts for 6-8-hours(!) with the right power-saving settings.  Recommended.  

Ken.
PS. the $300 HP netbooks have the same chips, just a smaller screen, so should work well too.

Next posts: An over of where I am going, and selecting a virtual instrument and a learning system.