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@jhhl Just purchased Polyharp as looks a very interesting app and currently cannot get midi to work or send via IAA or in Audiobus I checked all the boxes are ticked and routings etc currently on iOS 14.2 can you or anyone confirm it works still ?
Works here in AUM. Don’t forget to select MIDI and to route the midi out to AUM (and select “AUM destination” in your synth hosted in AUM)
Poly harp is so deep and fabulous like all his apps. I am a huge fan of his counting app and yes session. Cheers and that guy is a genius in my book. Over the top options but that's sweet and the midi is ace. AU oh my that's dreamy.
@cuscolima
Had the following settings (see below) in AUM and Polyharp with BS-16 piano still not getting any sound from BS-16. I noticed I’m still getting bleed through from the internal synth even with midi selected in Polyharp.
It's all good from a midi routing point of view. What is strange on your first printscreen is that you have no "strings" displayed on the instrument. Try to load another preset, it should work
@Jumpercollins i have to ask as I’ve done it dozens of times - does bs16i have a background audio setting?
...and another thing... play on the left of the “harp” for louder sound. It is very low on amplitude when playing on the right
Hi! I use PolyHarp with BS-16i a lot! Yes - make sure it can run in the background!
It's the little gear, then "Background/Virtual MIDI" switch.
BS-16i is one of the sampler/synths that can actually understand my MIDI-192 trick. Usually, that MIDI-192 switch should be off (looks like I have to fix if for Dark Mode though).
Read more about MIDI-192 here: http://www.jhhl.net/iPhone/PolyHarp/MIDI192.html
PolyHarp doesn't do MPE, but if you want it to drive GeoShred's SWAM instruments, just have it send MIDI on channel 2, which is where MPE's Zone 1 musical instruments listen. GeoShred's SWAMs are all monophonic for now, so that'll work pretty well. There's a Mozaic script that re-channelizes "normal" MIDI for MPE purposes, but this is a little easier.
Hi Guys thanks very much couldn’t get it working with BS -16 think it depends on the patch you use. Got Mela and World synth midi up now and working so I’m good to go. Just check had background audio on in standalone in BS - 16 had it loaded as a AU. Still doesn’t work maybe it’s the piano on off thing will have to try a different preset.
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Seems cool. Have only glanced at the manual but the first thing that has me scratching my head is why notes don't sustain when you change chords. So you have to let all sound die out before making a chord change, otherwise it will sound totally unnatural. There must be a way around this. Can anyone enlighten me? Cheers!
That's totally natural... for an Autoharp! Notes from the first chord that are also in the second continue ringing. If you pull the decay all the way to the right, it never decays! This is extra fun if you have multi string corses, since the strings will keep beating against each other. You can of course not use any chords and just pluck the strings. I also make up PolyHarps that assign each chord to its own string area, which means they don't interact with each other and so sustain all the notes.
That PolyHarp playlist might be fun to sit through!
PolyHarp starts with the premises of massive polyphony and microtonality, blended with the charmingly antique technology of autoharps, so - go for it!
Thnx! Time to watch some vids and read the very detailed manual 😁 👍
Are you using the apps internal sounds? If yes, I think the sound engine has a limited number of voices and the new chord requires voice re-assignments and the programmer took the route of just muting the old chord for a new one. Yes, it’s not realistic.
The app puts out MIDI (look for the MIDI label in the lower left) and touch ROUTE (I selected AUM) and loaded the DecentSampler “Zither” preset that I picked up free from PianoBook.co.uk. The chords sustain across chord changes beautifully.
DecentSampler is also free. There are GB’s of instruments available in this format and only about 20% of them fail to load. Hopefully, that metric gets smaller over time
Still… “Gift Horse… mouth…” Eevntaully you will be lured to buy some DecentSampler instruments. The “Ethereal Voice” sample for $10 is stunning.
This thread could turn into a poll on the “Ugliest Looking Apps You Still Love To Use”.
I have DS including the Decent Sampler Omnichord (from Dave's Patreon) and a few paid packs too. Yeah, running midi from this into that Omnichord or one of the other autoharp apps might be the way to go, though Autoharp has a lot of variety on the sound, and obviously a lot of time and thought and musical knowledge has gone into it. But yeah.... I really want to bliss out and not worry about glitching when I retrigger a note!
OK that's more like it! This works well as a player for DS instruments, nice call McD
Though actually you still have the issue of notes not sustaining when you switch to a chord that doesn't contain any of the same notes even if just using this to send midi out. Wonder if that behaviour could be altered. Whether it reflects the way a real autoharp works or not, an app needn't be limited in that way and it would be great to have the option for every note to get its full amount of sustain regardless of what other notes are or aren't doing.
I don't have time to do it right now, but I'm pretty sure there's a setting for preventing cut off notes somewhere in there. I actually went back and forth with the developer a while back and he was kind enough to implement a lot of changes that basically perfected the workflow I was hoping for. Will try and get back to this later when I get a chance.
Thanks! It's pretty deep so I'd rather know of it's capable of that before actually diving into the manual. On the dev's advice (super nice dude) I lengthened the attack. That doesn't solve the problem for me, unfortunately. He also mentioned settings you can use to deal with massive polyphony, but massive polyphony isn't the problem. This glitching can occur even when just a handle of notes have been played.
I hacked my Midi Filter Mozaic script to allow for muting Note Off events in the MIDI stream. I’ll post it up to PatchStorage for
Use cases like this where you’d like the autoharp to just let any Note On to ring without Note Off’s. It’s like playing the piano with the sustain pedal down. (I wonder how Decent Sampler treats this input with sustain (CC=64 On?)
Anyway, Mozaic is really wonderful for these small frustrations.
Patchstorage script at:
https://patchstorage.com/midi-monitor-and-filter-v1-0/
The uploaded image shows the 2 PADS that must be set:
Note On (Pad 1)
PassThrough Mode (Pad 16)
Refresh Page 1 listing.
PolyHarp works exactly like an autoharp, or exactly not like an autoharp. It's weird premise is that rather than choosing notes from a scale to make chords, you make chord and place them in sonic space and don't really have a scale. In 12EDO, those notes line up and you are left with 12EDO's kind of musical choices. The same goes for other chosen gamuts of notes. But Polyharp's paratactical tuning philosophy really makes it powerful.
If you pull the decay all the way to the right, the "strings" will not decay, but they can be damped by chords, which after all make chords by damping all the notes not in the chord.
But there's a switch in the main patch choice & control page that makes the chords act like piano damping: adding undamped notes to make chords. With this on, holding down two chords "unions" the notes instead of "intersecting" them. To hold two or more chords down, you have to toggle the "Stay Down" arrow, the arrow next to the Edit button. Stay Down is for people who don't know that you should hold autoharp buttons down, instead of tapping a chord and having it still damping or undamping when you pick up your finger.
I'm not clear what effect you are looking for that you (McD) want to fix with a Mozaic script - even though I really like Mozaic scripts. With decay at its maximum, the timer-set Note Off is disabled, and you only get Note Offs by changing chords (in damping mode). If you want notes to ring forever, you can assign each chord to its own string area and there won't be anything to damp it by changing chords, or if you want notes in a particular chord or bunch of chords to stay on, even if you take your finger off and choose another chord, that probably means you want to make that chord bar a lock bar, which toggles its on and off status.
It might also be prudent to make a chord button with a chord that actually has no notes in it, assigned to all the string areas just to have a panic button to shut them all off. My own version has this as a "0" chord, but I don't know what's actually in the app store version.
PolyHarp has a minimal amount of MIDI In capability, because it really doesn't map to MIDI's idea of what an instrument is. You can MIDI Learn button presses and controls, which was so I could push buttons on a controller and keep my hands from bumping into each other while pushing buttons and strumming. But there's no string response to Note Ons, say, and it won't play a corresponding note from the wavetable synth, which is not a great sounding synth anyway. That said, you can set up the chord bar to be a "hammer on" which opens up and plays all the notes, but I find that confuses PolyHarp in some cases which really means I should refactor it internally somewhere.
PolyHarp also has no Sequencing, Arpeggiation or anything else to do with timing outside of more or less hard coded constants build into the synth voices and how it reacts to attack and decay. I didn't want to deal with the responsibility of keeping in synch with other programs in the various ways that that's done, or even run my own clock. This is kind of too bad, because an arpeggio is naturally associated with an implicit chord spread through time. But then it'd need a whole infrastructure of maintaining and building those strums into a kind of song structure, and I didn't want to be in that business, although Omnichords do it. My song parts wouldn't be constrained to powers of 2 any more than my pitches are constrained to 12EDO! The program I wrote that PolyHarp was kind of based on, LYR (Amiga, 1987 or so), had a "strum sequencer" that didn't sequence chords OR notes, it sequenced how the strings were strummed and you have to press the chords yourself and let the strumming patterns play out.
I don't know it that clears anything up but if you actually play an autoharp, you can see how weirdly close it is - even letting you hear strummed damped strings (they just have higher damping constants) and allowing the same multi-button damping used in Prizm Zithers and adding drone strings.
I had to monitor the MIDI stream to be sure I understood the @Gavinski callout.
When you press a “C Major” chord and strum the app sends out MIDI NOTE ON’s for those chord notes.
When you press any other chord the app sends out NOTE NOTE OFF’s for those C Major notes and then sends
The new chord notes.
I think @gavinski just wants the C Major Notes to continue and bleed into the the chord… so throwing away all
MIDI NOTE OFF’s will do just that. If there’s a setting in the app to stop the NOTE OFF’s then the script is not needed to
Blend chord notes.
On a piano, the sustain pedal prevents any note from muting and all 88 notes can be played to ring out in a beautiful chaos.
Strumming the PolyHarp with selecting any chord buttons will do that just as an autoharp does.
I also made a “Tremolo” Mozaic app that sits well between PolyHarp and MIDI targets like Mandolins, Harps, Dulcimers, Marimbas, etc.
Using multiple Mozaic scripts in AUM is really easy unlike some other DAW’s that are coded to allow 1 MIDI FX app in a path.
I could add the “throw away” all NOTE OFF events as an option that Tremolo script since I have a spare PAD left to provide this option and I’ll probably do that in an update. A lot of world instruments just let the strings run and have no hardware for muting but the performers can use their hands (pronouns are all around us).
Thnx McD, will check that out, great of you to put that together
I hope you like the MIDI Monitoring feature too. If this works for what you want I’ll add the feature to the Tremolo v1.1 script and upload it too.
Yes but I also want to be able to fast strum a few notes up and then immediately strum down on the notes before they have fully decayed without glitching. Is this not possible on an autoharp Henry? I have never played one but would be very surprised they got popular if that was the case. Thnx though for your feedback, it's clear there are a lot of deep controls in the app, as I mentioned to McD earlier!
Here’s an autoharp video demonstrating Jazz (poly chords) by pushing multiple Chord buttons at once:
The buttons lower some muting felt and allow a select of strings to ring out and the rest just add some “scratching”.
They were popular because any master of the alphabet with fingers could play one. Having finger thimbles was a place to
Help prevent “grating” the flesh off your fingers doing a night of chord work.
This guy can pull melodies out of the string bed:
And play accompaniement rhythms. That takes a good sense of the instruments layout.
Lay it flat and flip it around you get access to the longer warmer sections of the instrument but you have to read upside down for the chord names. Is that upside-Downey-ism or dis-flexia?