Setting the talker's criteria

I learned to control the talker with keys from the Pico keyboard/keygroup, and with notes from an external source. But I have no luck with other sources:

  1. How to interpret incoming MIDI continuous controller, which parameters must be set in the talker?

  2. How to interpret internal Workbench signals, for example the octave output of a scaler, which parameters must be set in the talker?

Any hints and links are welcome.

i don’t think I’ve seen a talker ever take input from another source…

basically they are trigged by ‘key events’ , this works with midi, since midi notes are converted into key events.

usually talkers send fixed phrases (triggered by key events as above)
the exception to this is their interaction with things like the scale manager which has ‘variables’ which are then used by the talker (variable scale 1) , and set in browser or my belcanto.

(i think you can use variables outside of this, as I half remember doing this in one on my setups … see below)

you can also set talker phrases dynamically… though iirc, Ive had some issues with that in some cases :wink:


I think the largest source of Belcanto is probably in my Eigenharp project, which I used for quite a while to create full setups for pico and alpha, in their you will find ‘picomix’ a pretty complex setup I did for the pico.

inside the Scripts subfolder you’ll find some scripts to do various stuff
inside the ‘creator’ subfolder you’ll find the thing I built that combined templated belcanto to create setups.

I’ll be honest, I got happy with my setups quite a while ago - and so not been doing that much Belcanto as before , so my deeper knowledge of belcanto is a bit rusty.
hence why Ive not posted much in the way of replies, as id need to refresh my knowledge, and also probably dig back into the EigenD code in some places… and im lacking time at the moment.

e.g. the ‘controller input’ you see so frequently, basically is a way to throw information around eigend between modules, most ‘importantly’ information about key and musical layouts. but honestly, I can’t remember what else it can contains… id have to check the source code to see if its anything else … (i dont think so)

but hopefully the above scripts/templates will give you some ideas/pointers , and perhaps help in some of the trickier areas of Belcanto syntax e.g. setting control ids on connections.


a word of warning,
when I originally wrote picomix, I found some of the more esoteric areas ‘buggy’ e.g. things that id not see work in other setups, but thought ‘should’ work, often didn’t… as presumably they were untested.
worst still… more than once, I manage to corrupt the setup by doing something it didnt like i.e. belcanto would work, then EigenD would hang next time i tried to load it - this is why I moved towards the script approach - so I could recreate my work :wink:
BUT at a minimum , keep a backup of what you are working on in case it goes wrong :wink:

btw: if you’re a c++ coder , then the EigenD source code is available to check things out, but be warned its a pretty complex code base (understatement ? :wink: ) , so takes a bit of groking to get into it.

No, I’m no a c++ coder. After some adventurous expeditions into MSDOS Assembler a thousand years ago I decided not to go that deep :slight_smile: Over the years I gathered some experience with programming but only high level.

Regarding your picomix scripts:
I am not familiar with github and the various script elements you provide there. I could copy/paste the text snippets but would not know what to do with them. I do not even know how to run scripts in EigenD except calling the Eigenbrowser with the Pico itself.

I think I should rather learn EigenD/Workbench step by step and use what I can do and understand than loading complex setups which I never could adopt if something does not work as designed.

For the moment I accept that feeding a Talker with CCs from an external source may not be possible or is tricky, at least. I can use notes instead.