@DavidBenton Completely agree! I was hoping this could be achieved with noteOffset but it doesn't appear to be the case :(
<SeekerEntry inputLength="Default" inMin="0" inMax="1" outMin="0" outMax="127" seekerType="Note" eventSource="Default Note Source" noteOffset="0"/>
Thank heavens someone agreed with me! I thought it might be one of those weird things that only I had thought of. It might be possible in a chord preset but you might lose gestures (that's one thing I hadn't tried out with a chord preset acting like a lead thing).
Having played (not very well) instruments like hammered dulcimer, various concertinas and some other strange and arcane instruments I had hoped that key layouts on the Orba might be customable. The linier 1 - 8 pattern is not the most effective (though easiest to understand). There are, in fact, quite a few alternatives that make a lot of sense when you get to know them. The most obvious would play a scale as 1-8 -2 -7-3-6-4-5. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it's worth contemplating.
By the way, if you think re-mapping the keys as I described previously is complicated, it starts to make sense if you think of the 8 pads of the Orba as two rows of 4 pads. The axis that divides them doesn't really matter as long as you know what it is. For a harmonica player, as an example, one row could relate to notes played by blowing and the other for sucking (on an anglo-concertina, that would be equivalent to push and pull on the bellows).
I succeeded in making a chord preset which works as a lead playing a pentatonic scale from the lower 5th by making each chord from 2 octaves of the same note. (Using the Hazelwood voice I made previously it doesn't sound too obviously that it is in octaves.)
I should have realised sooner that playing it in isolation it's just like playing an ordinary pentatonic scale, but that's by the by.
I didn't manage to get a proper lead voice doing this. I did wonder whether there may be a different ModifierChain section that will work with a lead preset and take parameters that would do what we want - but I haven't seen anything like this (or that could be) in the presets I have seen so far.
Even making a working chord preset in the dulcimer style of Hazelwood with this sort of scale presents problems because you can't use one note more than twice in each chord - so you have to compromise, which is apparent in the AlmondTree preset I posted - it interrupts the drone on the 5th note.
David Benton
Artiphon should perhaps consider implementing pentatonic scales that start from the fifth rather than the root. The reason for this is that a lot of western songs, both traditional and popular in pentatonic scales, use a range that don't fit in 8 notes starting on the root. They tend to range from a fifth to a fifth or more an octave above that.
It may be different for music from other regions - but there's quite a lot that I can't do at the moment because of this.
Just a thought.
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