Critter & Guitari Organelle

TheTechnobear · 2017-09-13T17:43:30.738Z

I love the portability of the Organelle, and with it, its quirky keyboard

but, I wanted to match the Organelle’s sound flexibility to something that could be more expressive, so here it is:

This is an Eigenharp Pico running from an Organelle (off a battery no less) giving me fully expressive control via my MEC application (Eigenharps use a proprietary USB protocol).

I was amazed when I first tried that the Organelle still has enough power to run a decent synth patch (using Brds + Rngs reverb!) under pure data, which I communicated with via OSC. (T3D as used my ML for soundplane/synths)

Later I use MEC (still on the Organelle) to push out MIDI MPE over USB to an Axoloti for some fun, by sending the Axoloti audio back into Organelle for processing.
Axoloti is a great match for the Organelle, given its size/power usage and also create audio capabilities. (I also use it as a USB to midi din converter)

Its fantastic to think, this is all running on such tiny processors, all bus powered , off a usb battery that can last all day - a truely portable powerhouse.

MEC works with all Eigenharps models, and there are more controllers to come… one that I think, opens lots of doors

I also have the same running on a rPI3 + PiSound (blokas.io) + 7" touchscreen… but thats a story for another day.

KristofferLislegaard · 2017-09-13T21:39:02.735Z

Awesome! Looking forward to having more time to dive into the Organelle again! Great job you did there!

jasonw22 · 2017-09-14T14:20:25.834Z

Ack, so much awesome, you’re like Santa Claus. Between new Soundplane and Eigen controllers coming up, I don’t know which MPE device I’m waiting for! Although I don’t miss the Seaboard Grand’s reliability issues or Roli’s dependence on the Mac, I really do miss having an MPE device. Aftertouch just isn’t the same.

Curious to hear the Pisound tale…

shreeswifty · 2017-09-14T20:23:18.572Z

i just ordered the blokas pisound as well. Am i right in hoping that i can seat it on top of my raspi and assign it my audio card/midi duties? I see it has the ability to run stuff on it’s own so i am assuming i am going to have to use OSC or something but it would be really nice for it to integrate

mzero · 2017-09-15T00:38:07.763Z

Yes: Pisound sits right atop a raspi. Once you run their installer script, the Pisound is just there as an audio capture, and audio playback device in ALSA. It’s MIDI jacks show up in ALSA, too.

The Pisound itself doesn’t run anything on its own - it is just amps, DACs/ADCs, MIDI, some lights and “THE BUTTON”. Out o’the box (“out o’the installer?”) it runs PureData patches from the button, but it is easy enough to use what ever Linux audio software you want. I use PureData and it rocks, but others report using SuperCollider, SonicPi, MODs, and Jack software.

The button can be customized: It just launches shell scripts in /usr/local/etc/pisound/ so easily scriptable to do what you want.

TheTechnobear · 2017-09-15T09:16:30.357Z

yeah pisound is great, due to its standard 3/4" Jacks, and midi din, and the gain pots are useful, and just appears as a normal audio/midi interface.

only small drawbacks (no show stoppers) are:

if you fit behind a lcd panel, the midi din ports make the sd-card slot difficult to access (you need strong tweezers/small long nose pliers)
pots… limit how you can mount the board in an enclosure.
uses a lot of gpio ports, so not many left to use afterwards
no breakout for remaining gpio

Ive currently got mine mounted behind a 7" panel, and fortunately, the pots don’t interfere with the stand. though I’m probably going to build a small enclosure for the panel/pi, so that the pots can be a bit more accessible. (not sure if I can make ‘the button’ more accessible)

I think another strong point of PiSound is its getting a community behind it which is all about music application with a PI… something Ive not seen elsewhere.

anyway, back to organelle…
the reason I’m doing Organelle first is its more ‘supportable’… its a bit like iOS (Organelle) to Windows (rPI)

a closed platform, means delivery is easy, there is a prescribed way to deliver applications, and you know the setup your targetting
an open platform, means supporting users with different setups, different distros, different expertise… its a nightmare by comparison… and I think is what is partially holding the PI back for non-linux-hackers.

(linux, we have partly seen this with Axoloti, it seemed every Linux user we had, was using a different distro, that needed different support e.g. debian, Linux mint, arch Linux… then multiply that by different architectures, its a royal pain… compared to windows/mac os which get one image each )

mzero · 2017-09-15T14:51:55.714Z

TheTechnobear:

Ive currently got mine mounted behind a 7" panel, and fortunately, the pots don’t interfere with the stand.

Which LCD panel? Picture of this set up? For my current use, headless is fine, but I have another project forming that could use a small one.

rknLA · 2017-09-16T18:21:25.859Z

jasonw22:

I really do miss having an MPE device. Aftertouch just isn’t the same.

Linguistic confusion brought on by poor app naming…

Aftertouch as in the midi feature, or the app? Drop me a line if there’s anything I can do to make the app better

jasonw22 · 2017-09-16T18:52:43.757Z

Oh no, I meant the midi parameter! Unfortunately I don’t own a device with force touch or whatever it’s called so I haven’t been able to try your app. I’m sure it’s great!

TheTechnobear · 2017-09-17T18:15:01.916Z

@mzero here you go, a picture from today, whilst ive been testing the setup with the soundplane and axoloti.

IMG_1713.JPG3264×2448 1.19 MB

IMG_1714.JPG3264×2448 1.25 MB

I could do with tidying up the cables a bit, but whilst testing, I’m constantly pulling things in and out

so in this setup I have…
rPi3 + waveshare 7" touchscreen + PiSound (you can see on the back in 2nd pic) - pi3 is then connected to a ML Soundplane and Axoloti via a small 7 port usb hub, and a small wireless qwerty keyboard.
the pisound has the midi ports on the left, and the audio jacks at the top, so both unobstructed, the pisounds pots are on the back, so accessible for setting up, but you wouldn’t want to access whilst playing

its not a bad display 1024x600, comes with a little stand, which is fine for now.

oh… you will need a good power supply, i had lots of power issues until I bought the official PI 2.5 amp.
even so, I’m still finding some usb devices seem to prefer being attached to a powered usb hub.
(and its a bit easier to get to the usb ports when unplugging things)

rknLA · 2017-09-17T18:59:04.239Z

phew!

what’s the upcoming Eigen controller you were mentioning?

jasonw22 · 2017-09-17T19:49:36.896Z

I dunno, it was @TheTechnobear that teased us!

rknLA · 2017-09-17T20:17:30.632Z

The Pico above? It’s pretty old, you can get one right now http://www.eigenlabs.com/product/pico/

TheTechnobear · 2017-09-17T22:06:36.763Z

sorry, my bad… I meant there are more controllers to come for (=supported by) MEC , and so organelle, one in particular I have special plans for.

jasonw22 · 2017-09-17T23:32:25.483Z

Cool! I completely misunderstood though.

nuun · 2017-09-19T11:28:03.383Z

This thread motivated me to buy an organelle! Looking forward to play with all the patches posted above

shreeswifty · 2017-09-21T06:44:34.596Z

You will not be sorry, between Custom O/s and cool patches we are building a pretty full featured pd design tool.

Here is my latest audio mangler, groover, stretcher sampler tool

Dropbox

time2.zip

Shared with Dropbox

TheTechnobear · 2017-10-03T16:59:53.339Z

More progress on Organelle

instagram.com

Mark Harris

24 Likes, 6 Comments - Mark Harris (@thetechnobear) on Instagram: “OKontrol - work in progress”

some details of what I’m up to here :

Critter & Guitari – 3 Oct 17

oKontrol

in a couple of posts I eluded to some work Im up to on the Organelle, so I thought Id give a ‘sneak peek’ some perhaps will say … boring, another multi page menu system… but read on, its a bit different 😉 here it is in action: with an updated...

Reading time: 5 mins 🕑 Likes: 15 ❤

also perhaps important note… this means you can run Organelle patches unchanged on a rPI… using the Push 2 as you control/display device.

jasonw22 · 2017-10-03T17:02:00.801Z

Apologies for asking before clicking through, but is the Push 2 bit simply MIDI, in which case I could substitute an SL MkII?

TheTechnobear · 2017-10-03T17:18:38.434Z

jasonw22:

Apologies for asking before clicking through, but is the Push 2 bit simply MIDI, in which case I could substitute an SL MkII?

no the Push 2 has a high res, RGB display which you can access via USB (proprietary protocol, detailed here - it makes it a fantastic device for custom applications

however, part of oKontrol is also going to allow for midi learn, so then you can assign a CC to each organelle parameter too. I want do this as a ‘live mapping’ rather than hard coding CC.

whats going on here , is the Organelle is using my oKontrol external , which then communicates with my ‘MEC’ application via OSC , then in turn renders on the Push 2. all this is done running on the Organelle, but it could be distributed across macOS, rPI, Organelle (basically at this stage its a ‘distributed parameter system’)
(oKontrol is all C++ , so its the same code used in the external and within MEC, just different callbacks etc)

of course, as its sending out OSC messages, potentially I can do this with anything that can process OSC.

anyway… for non-techies, the idea is simple, write PD patches once (I can add other language support), and then run on different platforms, using different controllers to control the patch. also if you read the post on C&G you’ll see that its really easy to add these parameters to patches.

my personal goal is pretty simple, I want to write generic patches, and then run them on Organelle, rPI+PiSound or Bela depending on its needs… (oh and test/develop on mac/linux) …
(also I was frustrated at the effort i was spending on the display side, when writing PD patches… so I wanted it simple to do, and to test)