Improvement 1: Flip-Flopping the Overtone Selector
If you recall, the 3D Trombone has a controller operated with the right hand that selects the "overtone" played by the instrument. All that really means is that, depending on which buttons are pressed, a different note is played when the player blows into the instrument, and the series of notes are the same as you would hear if an acoustic trombone player was playing the overtone series.
In musical notation, that's:
Since I don't have a way of enulating the "overblowing" behavior that I can get on an acoustic trombone, I built a controller that lets the player press buttons to select the "overtone" played. It looks like this:
In my original firmware, I'd mapped the overtones as follows:
All switches open: Fundamental
Switch 4 pressed: overtone 1
Switches 3 and 4 pressed: overtone 2
Switches 2, 3 and 4 pressed: overtone 3
Switches 1, 2, 3 and 4 pressed: overtone 4
Switches 1, 2 and 3 pressed: overtone 5
Switches 1 and 2 pressed: overtone 6
Switch 1 pressed: overtone 7
I found this incredibly difficult to play. I often would unintentionally play a lower note when I intended to play a higher note, or vice-versa. At first I attributed this to being completely unfamiliar with the concept of using my fingers to select pitches, as opposed to using my embouchure.
But after playing "3d air trombone" for a while today, I wondered if some of my difficulties were due to the particular way I'd mapped the keys. So tonight I rewrote the firmware and turned the finger assignments completely upside down. And, lo and behold, it works a lot better. For some reason, it feels much more like the concepts of "up" and "down" make sense now.
To experience this, hold your right hand sideways in front of you, with your palm facing you. If you curl your fingers toward your palm, starting first with your pinky and ending with your index finger, that's the new motion I implemented, and it feels like "up" to me. I had it backwards before!
Improvement 2: Enabling Scene Selection in Ableton Live
Since I want to be able to take this setup and perform live at Maker Faire, I've been trying to build a live performance setup (by the way, I won't have a set location - I'm just hoping to find an electrical outlet somewhere and have an impromptu concert). Although I have mostly been using Apple Logic, I did get a Lite version of Ableton Live with one of the MIDI interfaces I bought, and I was able to upgrade to the Lite version of Live 8 for free.
I've always had a bit of a hard time getting my head around how Live works, but I think I'm starting to get it, and after spending some more time with the tutorials, I can see using it for my performances. Live has a concept of "scenes" that typically map to some musical structure. For example, the scenes might the intro, verse, chorus, break, and outro (for a traditional song form). For a dj, the scenes might be a collection of samples and beats that s/he selects in some sequence.
People who use Live seriously often have a dedicated hardware controller with big, lighted buttons that are easy to see in a dark environment and are easy to hit reliably in a performance. I really don't want to have to haul something like that around. So I decided to build in the ability to do scene selection with the 3d Trombone.
To accomplish that, I added an additional button, operated by the thumb. In the photo, it's labeled "Meta":
To select a scene in Live, you:
Stop playing any notes (that is, stop blowing)
Press button 1, 2, 3, or 4 to select a scene
Press and release the Meta button
When the firmware detects that the meta button was released, it reads the values of the other 4 buttons and sends a MIDI Note On event on an alternate MIDI channel. You can then use Live's MIDI mapping mode to assign that to one of the scene selection buttons in your Live set.
Being the geek I am, I was unhappy with only being able to select one of 4 scenes, so I wrote the firmware so that it reads the 4 switches as a 4-bit binary number and sends that as the MIDI note on. So, if you are able to do binary in your head, you can select up to 16 scenes (if you don't want to do that, you can still just use the 4 notes produced by pressing the 4 switches individually).
Next
Now that I seem to have something that's somewhat playable, the next step is to put together a few Live sets that have some backing material that I can use to show off the 3D Trombone. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the Apple Logic Softsynths are available from within Live, so I'll probably need to find an AU or VST synth plugin that is flexible enough to be controlled by my instrument. Most of the really high-end softsynths (things from Native Instruments, Omnisphere, etc) all have very sophisticated MIDI controller routing capabilities, so one of those is probably in my future. If anyone has suggestions for a specific synth they have gotten working well with a wind controller (e.g. a Yamaha WX series, or an Akai EWI), let me know.
Thanks for reading...
-Gordon
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