Adventures in #Eigenharp Land

So I was given an Eigenharp Pico for my birthday (a month early - result!). It is, quite simply, the best musical instrument I've ever played. And I have played a lot - I can play 8 different types of instrument not including drums (none of them brilliantly, though).

If you are a techy and in anyway musical YOU SHOULD BUY ONE OF THESE NOW. I'm not going to give you a list of reasons - JUST DO IT.

For all its brilliant-ness, it is challenging to learn the Eigenharp. Unlike conventional musical instruments the Eigenharp does not have all the notes available on the keyboard - you configure which key and scale you wish to play so you end up only having those notes. This is extremely useful for improvising and general noodling - but if you are an untrained, picked-it-up-as-you-went along musician like me, trying to play written music can be very frustrating. I can't look at a set of chords or sheet music and say, "oh, of course, F# dorian" - especially those chord sequences scribbled on the back of a beer mat in bad light at a dive during a folk-funk-punk-fusion session. Also, this key/scale configuration means there is no standard way to play "Am". The same chord shape is "Am" in C/major but "Dsus2" in E/blues.

So being a programmer I wrote myself an application to help me with this: EigenTab.  You provide a set of chords and the app tells you what your key/scale options are. It also shows you the chord shapes. It has helped me get to grips better with the Eigenharp.

Of course, I set myself unreasonable goals in writing the app: write once, test-driven so that it will work on major platforms (including windoze, osx, linux, iOS). And no conditional code that says anything like 'if windoze...'. Also, had to work offline without a server.

After a couple of false starts I ended up back with a most basic HTML/Javascript approach. Had to strip the UI of all graphics and 'fancy' interactions (like hover or other event behaviour). But in the end developed a 20K application that does work under all main OSes/browsers and even can be cached as an 'app' on the iPad. Have to say I'm pretty pleased with it and it makes my Eigenharping much easier.