I haven’t really used it/them for anything yet. My initial experience was that the sensitivity was poor. I also kept triggering the one on my Tau by accident so I just started ignoring it until I forgot it was even there.
But I’m in the process of rethinking my setups now and feel I might be missing out on something. I’ve seen youtube videos of people apparently having no problems with the sensitivity, and I guess the accidental triggering is just a matter of getting used to it being there. Since everything else on the Eigenharp hardware is so well designed, I suspect my initial problems were just “user errors”.
So, what do the rest of you think of the strips? Do you use them? If so, to do what?
from past conversations, I think many would agree with your comments. they do tend to require a pretty firm touch.
I don’t think its they were badly designed / manufactured, just these days we expect more sensitivity… and of course they contrast to the highly expressive keys and breath.
also, I guess if they were too sensitive, it be easy to accidentally touch them - particularly on the alpha and tau. (pico not so much)
I have used them, and they can be used to good effect,
but it tends to be pretty intentional , and I have to get used to them each time. (aka I dont use them as much as I would like)
iirc, setting them up can also feel (to me) a bit weird… particularly what they do when you release the touch. I need to have a play again to be sure… but you need to play with relative vs absolute, and also i think if its holds the last position or not.
Hmm, I’ve only used absolute, but relative would probably help mitigate the accidental touches problem.
I haven’t even thought about hold vs return. I’ve only used it as hold, but I think I’ve seen it used for pitch bend, where I assume it would jump back to some center value. The plan is to spend some quality time with EigenD this weekend. For the last year or two I’ve kept my setup to an absolute minimum, but now I feel inspired to add some more bells and whistles again. Stuff like the arranger and strummer. Looks like I should add improved use of the strip to that list.
The other thing which can help is using the bones around the first finger joint rather than the finger tip. There’s a dead zone at the edges of the strip which can be easy to stray into with the finger tip.
I’ve been messing with EigenD, the strip and GigPerformer all day and have come up with the following:
From EigenD:
Absolute (hold) CC11
Relative (hold) CC12
Strip Touch (on/off) CC13
…which I used for (with some simple GigPerformer scripting):
Strip touch as momentary switch (e.g. sustain pedal)
A “pitch slide” across an octave with Relative + strip touch for pitch bend that returns to center.
“Zones” on the strip by combining Strip touch and absolute. For instance momentary octave up by holding one half of the strip, octave down by holding the other half, middle octave when not touching the strip at all)
Swipe in one direction to turn something on, swipe in the other direction to turn it off by reading consecutive absolute values to see which direction the finger is moving in. (This one I haven’t actually tried yet, but I’m pretty sure it will work ok)
Absolute to control the crossfader on my Octatrack for all sorts of audio manipulation madness.
I’m not sure how much of this I’ll actually use. But sometimes it is just fun to explore what can be done. I had some issues in EigenD, though:
I was using MPE and wanted to use midi channel 1 for the strip. But whenever I played a note (on chan 2-16, obviously) the strip base value was sent on channel 1. I didn’t figure out why, so in the end I just switched to “global” instead and ignored all but one of the channels in GigPerformer.
Also, I struggled with return to origin. As far as I can tell, checking that doesn’t do anything at all. So I ended up using a Ranger between the keygroup absolute strip output and the midi converter for the touch on/off CC. Then I got the CC 0 value I wanted when I stopped touching the strip. Not sure why, though.
I find I use mine a lot for filter control on my software synths. I swipe down to open up the filter and up to close it. Also tend to map those to breath control, but for long, sustained filter sweeps, I find it very useful.
I’m fan of playing the Cello physical model with the strip. It does needs some practicing on the Alpha (because of position, “harder touch”) easier on the Pico; besides that the occasional mapping CC’s to low pass filters to bring sounds in/out.
I can look my setups if there is something of interest…
