Harptime performance FR

[zutzer]

I Like the sound of Harptime, but I would buy it in a second if it had any of these features.

I think the "strumming" or "glissando" with the modulation wheel is not very useful or Harp-like.

As soon as you move the wheel, it begins playing the notes, so you couldn't play a glissando from mid-range to low-range, then play one from mid-range to high-range because all the notes taking you from low back to mid would sound before you reached the middle of the range.

I think a way to improve this would be to assign a key so you would only hear the glissando notes when that key is pressed. In other words, the wheel would send notes after it receives a "Note On" message from that key, and would be silent on a "Note Off."

This got me thinking what would really put Harptime into another league would be to make it so the wheel would not simply play all the notes in a pre-defined scale (like chromatic), but would scroll through only the notes pressed by the player at the time they were using the Mod-Wheel. So if I played C-E-G and moved the modulation wheel, it would skip all the other notes and roll out a C Major chord for as long as held them. This would be an exact emulation of the Auto-Harp (or zither) as well as some of the functions of the pedals of a Concert Harp. So when you performed, if you wanted to strum a Pentatonic Scale from low to high range, you would hold down the five keys and move the wheel up, then when the wheel reached the end of its range, or you just stopped moving the wheel, you would go back to playing it normally with your keyboard. (See the end where I ramble on about technical challenges -performance, not coding- and possible solutions)

Second, some harp instruments like the Koto, allow you to actually bend the note, but for most harps you rely on grace notes or glissandos to approximate this effect. I think it would be cool if you could choose which behavior the pitch-bender would have. While a virtuoso keyboard player could simulate standard harp embellishments with rapid chromatic runs and so on, I think it would be fun to set a bender range to +-12 and be able to do a one octave run with the pitch bender up or down around whatever note your finger is on when you start moving it. To make it really deluxe you might add the option of what scale the bender follows. Pentatonic, micro-tonal, Major, minor, Whole-tone, whatever.

Something that you might want to keep in mind is that harp players tend to crescendo toward or decrescendo away from their target note. Since the center of the pitch-bender is usually the target note, it might be a good idea to have the velocity of the notes fall off the further from center the musician moves the bender.

If you really wanted to get crazy with this idea, you could add a portamento that instead of bending the note, would play all the notes between each key you hit, with speeds, time modes, and re-triggering controlled by the user exactly the way a portamento is on a VA Synth.

(Now the Ramblings I warned you about. See above).
Back to the modulation wheel. I think the biggest challenge to making the interactive scale-o-matic work is how to quickly change from normal playing mode to strumming mode. I think the simplest way would be to use key-switching or the damper pedal.

The problem with key switching is that the way I imagine using the technique already involves two hands, so you would end up having to hit the key or button to change modes, move the Mod Wheel, then hit it again to go back to normal play.

The problem with the damper pedal is that I don't remember how it works with Harp-Time (It's been a while since I tried the Demo). If it works the way a damper pedal normally does, I can't think of a way to have it do double duty as a mode switcher. I could imagine, though, that if I were designing a physically modeled harp, I might set it up so the strings were always resonating, and when you hit the pedal, it would mute them. If this was the case you could set it up so that in addition to sending a note-off message to all the keys, it also switched you into strumming mode, then when you lifted the pedal it would send another note-off message and return you to normal mode.

Without a way to switch back and forth, there would be the problem of the keys you hit to assign the notes the Mod. wheel will roll through sounding before every chord change. This problem might be solved if there was a user-definable zone where the notes would not sound, but you could use the keyboard to chose the notes played by the modulation wheel.

With physical modeling becoming more common now, especially plucked string models, I think making designs that allow musicians to use their keyboards and controllers in new ways might be a way to distinguish your products from the rest of the pack.

Just throwing it against the wall to see if anything sticks.

Cheers

[liqih]

Hey, many thanks for this feedback, I think you are pretty right on most points,
later I will write more thought and ideas about this.