I’m working hard on new songs and music, played on the Eigenharp, the Continuum and the Guitar. In anticipation of the sketches and ideas that I will be publishing in the coming weeks, I created my solo musician artist page on Akamusic, check it out!
It already contains videos of my latest Eigenharp work and you can also listen to the songs I recorded on my last solo CD that was published a few years ago.
I hope you like what you hear and if you do, please sign up at Akamusic and click on ‘Become a fan’. This will allow me to create some buzz and maybe start a community-produced music production using the Eigenharp.
Until recently, the Eigenharp instruments have only been available for online purchase at Eigenlab’s website.
I noticed that a dedicated ‘retailers section‘ has appeared on the website’s navigation, currently listing stores in the UK, France and the USA. I’m certain more will follow.
This is a nice development as I know that the instruments will be on display in certain of these stores. People will be able to actually see the excellent finish and craftsmanship, possibly even be allowed to try them out before their purchase. Obviously this is an important step into making the Eigenharp more popular and widely used.
The ‘Win an Eigenharp Alpha’ competition is over and Eigenlabs announced the winners. Sadly yours truly was just one place away from the grand Eigenharp Alpha prize, but I did win the runner up prize, which is Arturia’s Software Synth Collection.
I have to say that I’m somewhat surprised by the selection of the winners since I found that there are many other competition entries that show much more expressiveness and prowess on the Eigenharp Pico. In case you’re interested, here’s a page with all the entries.
Here’s the complete announcement from Eigenlabs:
The winner
After much deliberation on the part of the judges we are pleased to announce the winner of the ‘Win an Eigenharp Alpha’ competition is:
Curtis Stansfield
It was a very hard competition to judge – there were an good number of great entries and the general standard, particularly playing on a totally new instrument, was very good.
The runner ups
We’d also like to announce that we will be awarding runner up prizes of a copies of Arturia’s Software Synth Collection (worth £400) to Lukasz Piwek (Geek On Acid) for his ‘Spontaneous Electronic Facilitation’, and Geert Bevin for his ‘Winter Movement’:
Lukasz Piwek
Geert Bevin
The honourable mentions
Honourable mentions and an Eigenlabs laptop bag go to Kayla Kavanagh for her solo Pico piano performance in York Minster and to Piotr Chlipalski and Irene Folusz for both the first Pico duet and the first Pico version of ‘Smoke On The Water’, which made John Lambert laugh a lot.
Kayla Kavanagh
Piotr Chlipalski and Ireneusz Folusz
Congratulations and thanks to everyone who took part – we all really enjoyed seeing entries come in and watching people’s Pico skills evolve throughout the competition was fantastic.
It used to be that you’d have to wait 6-8 weeks for the Eigenharp Alpha to ship after ordering, that’s a long time when you’re excited about a new instrument!
It seems that Eigenlabs has done a lot of work to improve this aspect and is now shipping standard finishes with plastic keys with only one week of delay! Of course, due to the nature of handcrafted wooden keys, you need to add additional delays for those if you order that option.
In any case, this a great development and Eigenlabs’ production team doesn’t seem to sit still to work on improvements in this area. I’ve reached out to them and they confirmed that this is an ongoing process that they’re continually working on. Later in the year this might even improve more.
Thanks Eigenlabs, this makes it even more satisfying for us impulse buyers! 😉
Eigenlabs finally created a public wiki on their website with lots of useful information.
Since the launch of the Eigenharp instruments, many users have been wanting to get their hands on the more configurable aspects of the software. Over the last months, features have gradually appeared in EigenD, like scripting, the Commander and Belcanto input from the instruments.
Finally, some detailed information about how to use it all is now appearing on the wiki:
This is my first (and only) entry into the Eigenlabs win a alpha competition. I used a Zoom R16 to record 8 tracks – 2 groove tracks using Stylus RMX and the remaining 6 tracks are all using the Pico live. The samples used are my own from my Vocalsphere collection. I also used the Pico’s built in Clarinet model for soloing.
Thank you for watching – Mike Felker (aka Karmacomposer)
Here’s what’s really unique going on here. Free tonality….
I’m using a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI Foot Controller to change scales on the fly. I also have the “change octave” key remapped to a tritone. This allows improvisation like a jazz player using multiple scales to superimpose different tonalities over a static chord vamp.
I’m using the I, II and V minor pentatonic scales over this vamp. These are classic jazz subs. Then the tri-tone key allows me to take motifs on all these scales and move them in and out of the harmony… again another classic Jazz sub.
No longer trapped in a single scale this opens up the entire instrument to creative Jazz improvisation and superimposition. Total harmonic freedom…. and this is just scratching the surface of possibilities.
The Alpha would bring even more freedom to exploring and developing these concepts….
Time is a good friend of musicians… well sometimes. This fourth entrie to the “Win an EIGENHARP ALPHA” competition, as the title says, is more like a demo, sounds and loops from the EigenD, FM8 and MIDI to the VL1-m, I’ll try to make some captations to the video.
