Tom Hall

 can be traced back literally thousands of years, each new variation having the previous history written into it – virginals, clavichords, and harpsichords descending from the hammered dulcimer in the Middle ages, crossbreeding with the portative organ. Those instruments did their work by opening a pipe or plucking a string via keyboard action, resulting in the same sound resonating from the instruments regardless of how the note was played. Although popular, it never gained mainstream popularity, failing to trend across social media.

The instrument has been an ongoing solution to the problem of how to be expressive. That ongoing project gave us Christofori’s piano (Bartolomeo Cristofori being a talented maker of the Clavichord – the then newest thing, at the time the Clavichord lacked volume, although it did have expressive control of volume and sustain). His piano dropped in 1700 (although some argue 1698. Go figure.), and we had a nice ‘little’ instrument that could express how we felt - to extend movement and sustain multiple notes. This bad boy hit the big time, trending for centuries and becoming one of the most dominant instruments in its class.

Fast forward a few and Roli drops one of the most interesting keyboards of this century. It takes the problem of expressiveness and control to a new level with 5-Dimensions of touch - Velocity, Pressure, Aftertouch, Pitch Bend, Slide. The beauty of this is that these dimensions can be accessed and manipulated on a per note/finger basis, completely independent of each other (using the MPE extensions to the MIDI standard).

My first impression on touching the Rise, “Wow, this feels great!!” Then I touched it again, and again, and again, pressing down wiggling my hand. Perhaps it’s the rubbery skin-like flesh, but I was definitely drawn to it and enjoyed the reactiveness of the touch and the pushback from the keywaves - remarkably different to a normal keyboard or Piano.

When I hooked the little 25-note keyboard up to Max for the first time I was inundated with a torrent of data, and I immediately set about building a patch to leverage absolutely every byte it could offer me.

The results are outstanding, and I’m still in the midst of dealing with it all. The data the Roli Seaboard Rise generates can be leveraged in a way that allows the possibility of a live performance (or studio recording) where one can simply play whilst controlling post note manipulation, fx and data without the need for any other controller or even needing to move your hands off of the keyboard, as a real possibility.

A first encounter between Roli's new Seaboard Rise and Cycling '74s Max7 (Max/MSP) 

patching and playing by Tom Hall
http://tomhall.com.au
@tomhallsonics

Max meets Roli Seaboard Rise

I look forward to bringing you more insights about using the Seaboard Rise with Max and MPE midi, more soon…

The origins of the Roli Seaboard Rise can be traced back literally thousands of years, each new variation having the previous history written into it – virginals, clavichords, and harpsichords descending from the hammered dulcimer in the Middle ages, crossbreeding with the portative organ. Those instruments did their work by opening a pipe or plucking a string via keyboard action, resulting in the same sound resonating from the instruments regardless of how the note was played. Although popular, it never gained mainstream popularity, failing to trend across social media.

I look forward to bringing you more insights about using the Seaboard Rise with Max and MPE midi, more soon…


max-meets-roli-seaboard-rise

I'd be very interested to hear if you've found all that data generated, as a beginner at max I only got xbend at the full range and have yet to discover how to recover or control the 5 dimensions but looking forward to it

Since you can limit or fudge/curve the sensitivity and as a weak-handed keyboardist I cannot wait to play with it set up correctly, let alone spot the minimum workable sensitivity - kitchen scales get less accurate the less you put on them - a case of finishing reading the brilliantly minimalist manual, only this time taking notes!

(PS cat warning - the documenter points out his cat happily clawed / chewed it's way through his silicone surface, bottom of care & cleaning?)

Got a wrapper for the vst~ of equator working with all 200-odd params visible thru live.object. So could turn off delay and reverb and clone those settings for ableton-side delay, reverb etc. Also, Equator doesn't yet have compressor that I can see, or employ pre delay so performing live it's handy to not even launch live or reason if a standalone app like the m4l instrument wrapper can do it. Stage ready!

Making a "octave-down for instrument 1", "up for instrument 3" patch, then building up the church-organ-ness with pipes and chambers out the back automatable from ableton or natively (since we all want to pull out all the stops)

Maybe some kind of loopstation analog to handle loop boundary jumps in cc values which should keep me busy till I can also turn it into a 5D super-sensor!

When trying the Seaboard at the Musikmesse last year, I noticed one big drawback: the threshold for when a note is triggered feels very arbitrary.

Since there is no weighted mechanism of any kind that gives you the feedback of a key press, it seems to me that it is hard to ever get to a point where simply playing notes will feel natural. I feel it can be hard to build muscle memory this way.

Is this something you recognize? Do you think this could be a fundamental drawback of the Seaboard concept?

When trying the Seaboard at the Musikmesse last year, I noticed one big drawback: the threshold for when a note is triggered feels very arbitrary. 

Is this something you recognize? Do you think this could be a fundamental drawback of the Seaboard concept?


I have some version of the same problem with virtually every "weighted" MIDI keyboard I go near, and quite a lot of the unweighted ones. Indeed, my comfort with some keyboards over others (the recent NI unweighted keyboard being an interesting example) has to do with whether I use it or not. I'm not sure that the Roli Seaboard is all that qualitatively different. Of course, I am a lousy keyboard player, so your mileage as a *good* one might vary.

@keith nelson midiin > midiparse get's you a long way to leveraging a lot of the incoming data (combined with xbend) - this is covered in the MaxMSP patches available at Roli's Github 

@mattijus Muscle memory certainly plays a part with the Rise, the more time I spend with it the better I am able to play it, also increasing my control of subtle data manipulation, but this is the same for most instruments. The trigger point for the note has not been something i've noticed, but aside from the Rise most of my time is spent of pads or other midi keyboards, rarely a traditional Piano (unfortunately).

@keith nelson midiin > midiparse get's you a long way to leveraging a lot of the incoming data (combined with xbend) - this is covered in the MaxMSP patches available at Roli's Github https://github.com/WeAreROLI/SeaboardAPI

@mattijus Muscle memory certainly plays a part with the Rise, the more time I spend with it the better I am able to play it, also increasing my control of subtle data manipulation, but this is the same for most instruments. The trigger point for the note has not been something i've noticed, but aside from the Rise most of my time is spent of pads or other midi keyboards, rarely a traditional Piano (unfortunately).


Thx - ps the JUCE api (what equator was built with?) looks incredible for ui building and mapping controls.

Re minimum sensitivity - some macros swing other values eg if bending one note then hitting another suddenly the main hit of the sound is gone till the effect wears off very shortly after so I half thought that was it but not convinced. Hard to tell if there's a misreading of touches (which it has seemed like) or that instrument is set up in equator to only pluck if you hit above 30% velocity / 'press' or the above.

I found it is weighted for a heavy dig-in-to-the-notes style of playing till you either tweak those 5d settings, or play it differently (the dashboard / settings might help figure that out)

Was hoping it would help a weaker-muscled player myself but I always end up getting really into it and trying a sort of psycho frenetic vibrato on everything just to see what happens!

When all the distraction wears off slightly (they just extended equator/presets) will post a picture of the tweaks for lighter / est playing will post here. The limit for press (slider 3) is not it.

[ PS Did see some strange behaviour in ableton after renaming the channel tracks where a note wasn't coming through on one or two channels (but max and rtmidi showed not so) Fixed it in the end by starting over adding the vst and 9 channels and mapping those - ROLI updates were out recently and had to rebuild a template there and some channels didn't work, whatever the cause (I still think it only happens when I rename tracks) it went away when I replaced the vst with the updated vst (same file same place weirdly) and rebuilt. ]

I found it is weighted for a heavy dig-in-to-the-notes style of playing till you either tweak those 5d settings, or play it differently (the dashboard / settings might help figure that out) 

[ PS Did see some strange behaviour in ableton after renaming the channel tracks where a note wasn't coming through on one or two channels (but max and rtmidi showed not so) Fixed it in the end by starting over adding the vst  and 9 channels and mapping those - ROLI updates were out recently and had to rebuild a template there and some channels didn't work, whatever the cause (I still think it only happens when I rename tracks) it went away when I replaced the vst with the updated vst (same file same place weirdly) and rebuilt. ]


in terms of robustness how comfortable would people feel beating on it? like with sticks or mallets? dropping balls?

or hmm slapping/ karate chopping it? haha. there are so many shapes, velocities, direction possibilities you have with whole hand, it'd be pretty wild to be able to get usable data from all of that, i think. or maybe something like making flyswatters/paddles with different size and shape holes cut in them. or maybe knead it with knuckles and palms like dough? ...seems you could do some pretty cool talking drum kinda things with it.

seems natural to treat it as a membrane/string hybrid? lol quantum mechanics... maybe they'll make an 'm-brane' for more explicitly rhythmic uses...@@

or hmm  slapping/ karate chopping it?  haha. there are so many shapes, velocities, direction possibilities you have with whole hand, it'd be pretty wild to be able to get usable data from all of that, i think. or maybe something like making flyswatters/paddles with different size and shape holes cut in them. or maybe knead it with knuckles and palms like dough? ...seems you could do some pretty cool talking drum kinda things with it.

seems natural to treat it as a membrane/string hybrid? lol quantum mechanics... maybe they'll make an 'm-brane' for more explicitly rhythmic uses...@@


Nice post! Where can I get those synths. I am a newbie in programming via Max so would be cool to get some advice. Thanks in advance. :)

How are you getting on integrating the RISE into your MAX/Eurorack set up?

lovely little workspace. i am watching the seaboard controllers since they are out, probably the best price per value in this region atm and they look great. i am just not too fond of MIDI and low resolution stuff in general.

btw.: is the kitten included and if yes, does it have USB?

this is great insight. Thanks for all of your opinions and reviews of the Roli Rise. I am looking to purchase one for live sound applications while performing with a roland loop station, some hand sonic percussion, and prerecorded mixes when I DJ. Does anyone have a suggestion for best sound cards to use?

Great review. However, the review leaves it open what value Max 7 brings in here. Can you elaborate bit more on your Max 7 patcher?

@roman, it's an ethernet connection. CAT 5

Max Meets Roli Seaboard Rise