Sunday Synth Jam: Here’s a performance on the Eigenharp Alpha, Macedonian Morning, from Bill Whelan’s score for Riverdance.

Technical details below.

via youdhjtube:

This is my second song performed with the Eigenharp Alpha. Called Macedonian Morning, it’s another tune from Riverdance. Like the Lament, I’m using Apple MainStage with several splits to produce the audio output, including whistle, sax and the orchestral string backgrounds. Max is being used as well to generate the MIDI note values for the chords, and bass in the middle. In this rendition however, I’m allowing Max to sustain the chord until I trigger the next one so that I don’t have to keep my finger on a chord key. Having multiple keys depressed at the same time interferes with the ability to do proper pitch bends.

One cute trick here with Max is to detect a key and use it as a toggle to alternately send a control change with a value of either 0 or 127 to a “button” in MainStage. In MainStage, I have that button mapped to the volume of the whistle and sax channel strips, one inverted. Therefore, touching the designated key on the Eigenharp instantly switches between the whistle and the sax.

Although I have the music notation on my iPad, of course done with Scorecerer, I played this song so many times to get the pitchbending to my taste that I ended up not needing to look at the music!