Im still loving my Organelle, and have something to share with you
I love the compactness of the Organelle, and the fact it is so portable (here seen with a usb battery pack, that lasts all day!)… and that includes its quirky keyboard.
but for those that have seen my youtube channel, you’ll also know I have a passion for expressive controllers, so it was natural for me to want to add something expressive to the Organelle.
The Organelle is a natural companion for my Pico, given its a similar size, and also portable - and with Pure Data, I can easily write patches to use the full expressive control from the Eigenharp.
The Eigenharps use the their own proprietary usb protocol, but fortunately Id already been working on my own app (MEC) to run under linux, and ARM… so I was happy when I ported it over to the Organelle that it worked without a hitch.
this is no mean feat for Organelle, given the Pico generates x/y/z for every key, 10bit, at 2000/second… which makes it ridiculously responsive and has a ‘feather touch’
In this video you’ll see two things
the first, I use the Pico (via MEC) communicating with a PD patch on the Organelle via OSC, amazingly responsive keeps full resolution. (4 voices of brds + rngs_reverb + bob, so non-trivial cpu wise)
the second, I use MEC to send MIDI (MPE) to an Axoloti board which I then route the audio back into Organelle for some audio mangling fun
as I say, a true testament to Organelles design and flexibility…
this is not the end though…
the pico, also has LEDs, so its ideal for things like step sequencers.
Ive another controller to connect to Organelle which is super exciting, and that I suspect more of you have , it you do
Thanks for sharing this. It is good to see / hear the Organelle working in this context. Nice job with the patching and mapping as well, always the bigger challenge is figuring out what to do with all that data, and this sounds great.
it already does (in theory) …
I added Soundplane support to MEC (my app that does all the magic ) a while back.
I say in theory, since I’ve just not tried it yet - I tried previously, on a beaglebone black/bela combo, which is similar in performance to Organelle, and found the madrona labs touch tracker was a bit CPU heavy. but Randy (ML) has been rewriting the touch tracker, with the intention of reducing CPU, this he now has in Beta, I’ve been waiting for him to say its done, then I will port the code over to MEC.
that all said, I’ll give it a go over the weekend, the Organelle surprised me with the Eigenharp code, so perhaps it’ll be ok… especially if I limit the touch count a bit.
@naxuu , ok so had a test and a bit disappointing
Ive just tried with the soundpland and also the larger eigenharps (tau/alpha) and all are seeming to fail due to ‘insufficient usb bandwidth’ … my suspicion is this is because they are all USB 2.0 devices rather than 1.x.
Im a little surprised by this, as in previous tests the Beaglebone Black and rPI 2&3 did not have issues with this.
so I’m wondering if the Organelles bandwidth is for some reason restricted… its odd as I’m pretty sure the Organelle is USB 2.0.
Im going to need to do a bit more testing and investigation, as sometimes, these things can be erroneously reported.
Wow, really great stuff. Thanks a lot for sharing (and for all the great patches), I’m not sure where you, Pat and Owen find the time! Color me humble and inspired.
Any thoughts on KMI gear like QuNeo or QuNexus? I’m not familiar with the Pico, but It seems like the organelle should get the same types of messages from all 3 controllers using MEC/MPE?
And maybe more importantly, what are the chances of a layperson implementing any of this particular awesome? Between (slowly) learning pd for organelle, max for monome and sound design as a whole, I’m not sure how far I can go down the Axoloti rabbit hole…
the QuNeo and QuNexus talk midi, so you wont need MEC, but also I dont think they support MPE (but I may be wrong… I know the new k-Board Pro 4 does)
I think the QuNeo/QuNexus however do support poly aftertouch, which could can receive (in pd) using polytouchin… this trick they is to track down the voice thats been used for that particular note.
its not particularly difficult, once you have got a basic understanding of how to implement polyphony in pure data.
When I use QuNeo I usually just give each pad it’s own voice and [switch~] off voices that aren’t being used. Voice allocation gets real confusing real fast depending on what you want your synth to do and how you want to control it.
Also I tried using the QuNeo with Organelle and wasn’t able to get it to even power on. I will need to look more into it, but it was very strange that even as a supposedly class compliant USB MIDI device it didn’t run it’s LED boot sequence.
did you try with a powered usb hub? often these things draw a little too much current.
(also its always worth trying devices with/without hubs, powered/non-powered … as there are some quirks in various kernel versions)
) a while back.