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.
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).
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.
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).
@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"/>
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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