Eigenharp and Ableton Live 9 Integration

Another great project in progress on the Eigenharp G+ Community, this time by Mark Powell.

Here’s what he has to say:

It’s still a work-in-progress, but for the benefit of Randy Brown and anyone else who’s interested, here’s a quick (very rough) demo of my work on the Eigenharp Ableton control surface script. It’s currently dependent on a very Heath Robinson modification to the Midi Input agent, so not published just yet, but once I’ve tidied things up I intend to properly issue it so that others can use/amend to their hearts’ content.

Because I’ve had to use the built-in Macbook webcam for now, the Eigenharp is shown sideways on, but essentially each of the five columns on the Alpha represent a track in Live. Rows 1-6 mirror the clips that have focus (determined by the 5×6 blue box on the Live screen, which can be moved from the Alpha). Row 7 allows each track to be turned on/off, 8 allows each track to be solo’d, 9 allows each to be armed for record. It’s multi-touch, so you can arm/solo multiple tracks by clicking several buttons at once. Also any changes in Live are automatically reflected on the Alpha. Row 10 gives a Stop button for each track and will thus stop any clip currently playing on that track. Rows 11 and 12 are there to give an up/down/left/right controller to move the focus box in Live. Because it’s working with a control surface script in Live, there’s no project-by-project config to do at that end – if the EigenD setup containing the relevant agents and talkers is set up then it’ll just work with a brand new Live set. Likewise, although this is setup for an Alpha, with fairly minor tweaking it’s possible to setup other sized interfaces for different Eigenharps. With this 5×12 grid there seems to be no latency on my i7 machine, so theoretically you could have a page in your EigenD setup that shows a 5×24 clip launcher. It’s not shown in the video, but you can also map buttons to control Live’s transport controls, metronome, tempo, etc., all direct from the ‘harp.