Please unlock the first four presets!

#1

First, I want say that I love the idea of the Instrument 1, and with some tweaks, it could be a great asset for learning and performing.

That said, THE most frustrating thing about this Instrument is being locked out of the first four presets. I like to play in my bed or the couch when I’m feeling lazy, but every time I do, the useless auto flip setting swaps the strings, stopping me from playing just so I can fix the issue. The most frustrating part is that the de facto manufacturer response is “save a right-handed guitar preset to the user slot”…WHY?! Why would I waste a slot to have two identical presets, aside from the handedness??? Who’s trying to show off being ambidextrous so much that they just have to have the stock presets keep this obnoxious feature? More to the point, what someone is performing and wants to play it upside-down, like the flourishes you can do with a real guitar?

It makes no sense to lock customers out of editing the Instrument they paid for, and the unwillingness to allow edits for a simple thing relegates this thing to being a toy.
A hardware synth of the same price lets you customize all 128+ patches to your taste, but this only lets you mess with 4 of the 8 possible presets for no discernible reason.

#2

While I wouldn’t word it as harshly as “booking” has, I would agree that the ability to edit these would be preferred. Mainly because I would like to edit the amount of hammer on sensitivity on some settings,. As an aside, it would also be greatly appreciated to have per-preset single/multi-channel, rather than a single global setting. For example I find it necessary to use multi on any fretless mode, but on fretted modes I don’t always find it necessary, only if I need that level of expression.

#3

I’ve asked for the string flip mode setting to be moved out of the presets. It seems to me that one would normally have it as either right or left or auto, but not normally want more than one.

Interesting about the single/multi channel. I would have though that one would set it based on the app you were using. The thing is that just as @booking wanted the string flip mode to be out of the preset, others would not want the channel setting to be in a preset for the same reason.

Maybe what we need is a default setting that applies generally, and then a preset override.

#4

I understand wanting to make the initial box opening universal, but to lock the presets from being edited says to me that either:

A. They think the consumer can’t be trusted to edit presets and will somehow be confused if they save, say, a piano preset to the drum icon…As if we’re too stupid to know what preset we saved where.

B. They want this not to be a personal item, but to be shared with many people, like a toy.

C. They are assuming people will sell it off to someone else and not reset the presets, to the new owner’s frustration.

The most insane bit is that there is a factory reset option in the settings, but who can even say what you’re supposed to be resetting? The user presets? What person 2nd-hand purchasing cares about those?

There’s a lot of good ideas to be had in the use of the Instrument 1, but as it stands with its Casio-keyboard demo mode for 50% of the presets, it makes me wish I had just saved up and bought a Ztar or Misa Digital’s Kitara or Tri-Bass when they still made them.

#5

Not that I know anything about their thought process, but I’ve had similar situations come up while I was a software product manager. In my case, our focus was on ease of use and fairly simple applications. Very soon after release, we had customers showing how complex their actual applications were and how we had to revise our approach, including making some built-in aspects optional.

I think it was simply a case of thinking that 4 user preset slots would be more than adequate and this was more novice users wouldn’t have to fiddle with the basic presets.

That said, I agree that all 8 slots should be available to the user. Those presets can be moved into the default presets provided. Artiphon has shown that they listen to their users. They may not be able to do everything or things as fast as we might like, but they do listen.

#6

Interesting discussion. The editability of the first four onboard presets is really a sub-issue of the larger limitation that there are only eight such slots in total. That’s not really a major problem for most users because you’re always connected to something running the presets app, which has unlimited slots, and four onboard slots is about all I find I can keep track of anyway without some kind of display on the device itself to remind me what I’ve currently got loaded in each. The usefulness of onboard presets is also currently limited by the need to switch between them by cycling through them, though selecting from a large number of user presets in the app has its own problems and can involve rather a lot of swiping through folders.

I don’t know whether the I1 hardware actually makes it possible to store more than eight presets on board, but if it does then the challenge then becomes to devise a way of storing them in places you can actually remember and allowing you to switch quickly to a specific one. The YouRock guitar controller has a mode you go into with a button press that lets you choose presets by tapping a particular string and fret, which on the I1 would allow you to assign up to 78 presets; you could then use a simple binary code with combinations of preset lights to tell you which preset you’d selected. On the YouRock, I’ve tended to find that associating presets with notes on the fingerboard makes it surprisingly easy to remember what’s where and select the one you want from a large bank of options.

#7

Well I want to say thank you for fixing the obnoxious flip feature, I know I was very rant-y in my posts about it. The new update did, however, cause the iOS audio to crap out after too many notes. Does it on most music apps so far, the speakers stop playing, but the app will still show audio playing

#8

This sounds like something I got while playing in Oriental Strings, but attributed at the time to that app (which doesn’t play as well with the I1 as some) rather than to the Artiphon update. I’ll see if I can reproduce it.

#9

Yeah, I’m not super clear on why it’s doing it. It’s only worked so far once today in SynthMaster player. I had to close out everything else on the phone (7 plus). I still have to try it out on my Air 2, and I’m charging the I1 up to make sure it’s not some weird power issue.

#10

The other reason I think it’s some sort of Instrument issue is it’s happening on the updated artiphon app too. After that I tried it on the other apps

#11

Hi, could you send an email to support@artiphon.com so we can track this issue? We need to separate out if it is the iOS device, the Instrument 1, the cable, or the software causing trouble here.

#12

In general, please try to close all other apps and disable channel (fingerboard) pressure, tilt, string bending to check if your device may not handle the amount of notes and controller data fast enough.

#13

I did try this evening to reproduce the audio dropout I experienced (twice, I think), but after a couple of hours of fairly serious abuse going in and out of lots of other sound apps and leaving them unclosed, the worst I got was one crash of the Artiphon app, some loss of polyphony (fairly common when I’ve been overloading the audio) and a few stuck notes in Beathawk and Synthmaster Player when I had them playing drones off the bridge triggers on a separate channel (using Midiflow to reroute them). No actual audio dropout, though I mostly had aftertouch off, so wasn’t pumping out MIDI messages the way that does. Sorry not to have come up with anything useful so far; I might try again with aftertouch on.

#14

Ok, I tried again after the 10.3.2 iOS update and it seems the bug is gone. It seems it might be specific to the 7 Plus. I noticed recently if I played a sleep analysis app (which uses the microphone/accelerometer) and play an audiobook AND have the charger in, the audio would intermittently crackle. It seems like however they coded the audio pickup/playback may have been causing the issue with the phone, since this is one of Apple’s first lightning-port only devices. I don’t have a regular 7 to test that theory.

#15

Please make all 8 slots be available to the users

dE.niz

#16

Yes please. Having all 8 slots available would make experimentation on specific instrument types much easier. Personally I never use the violin or piano slots so that’s just wasted space. And if I ever needed that sort of preset, they’re available from the built-in set.

#17

Does anyone still want this? It should be technically possible.
In the past I experimented sending MIDI sysex commands to the Instrument 1 and managed to switch active presets on the device. I had used a linux command line program called “amidi” to do so.

I could give it a try sometime. However this would be something not for the less tech savvy.

For reference here is and example of the text version of the sysex commands you’d have to do:

  1. {“cmd”:“set”,“msgid”:1,“data”:{“preset”:{“json_version”:“1.0.1”,“fingerboard_tuning”:[48,50,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,50,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,84,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,84,86],“preset_name”:“Perfect Fourth Guitar”,“string_flip”:“accel_flip”,“method”:“strum”,“mode”:“fretted_string”,“tuning_name”:“Custom”,“transpose_step”:1,“bridgeboard_tuning”:[40,45,50,55,60,65],“sound_profile”:0,“id”:“edit_buffer”,“fret_pressure_message”:“poly_press”,“arpeggiator”:false,“twelve_string”:false,“ibow_enabled”:false,“is_factory_preset”:false,“factory_folder”:0,“delay_enabled”:true,“reverb_enabled”:true,“arpeggiator_subdivider”:8,“bridge_pressure_message”:“none”,“pressure_sensitivity”:1}}}

  2. {“cmd”:“set”,“msgid”:2,“data”:{“preset”:{“json_version”:“1.0.1”,“fingerboard_tuning”:[48,50,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,50,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,84,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,84,86],“preset_name”:“Perfect Fourth Guitar”,“string_flip”:“accel_flip”,“method”:“strum”,“mode”:“fretted_string”,“tuning_name”:“Custom”,“transpose_step”:1,“bridgeboard_tuning”:[40,45,50,55,60,65],“sound_profile”:0,“id”:5,“fret_pressure_message”:“poly_press”,“arpeggiator”:false,“twelve_string”:false,“ibow_enabled”:false,“is_factory_preset”:false,“factory_folder”:0,“delay_enabled”:true,“reverb_enabled”:true,“arpeggiator_subdivider”:8,“bridge_pressure_message”:“none”,“pressure_sensitivity”:1}}}

  3. {“cmd”:“save”,“msgid”:3,“data”:{“preset”:{“id”:5}}}

  4. {“cmd”:“activate”,“msgid”:4,“data”:{“preset”:{“id”:5}}}

At a high level what this does is: load to buffer, set to id(preset slot) 5 (user preset 1), save it, and the Editor program activates it immediately after saving it.

So it would be a matter of seeing what happens when you use id 1-4.

#18

So I just verified that it is possible for this to be done. To test this, what I did was save the Guitar Preset from Preset 1, into Preset 4 (the one reserved for the Drums). This can be applied for any preset and any slot.

Feel free to take a look for yourself: Picture of the a setup saved in softlocked preset slot.

Once again, I used the linux command line program amidi to set raw binary to the midi device. So, I sent the binary versions of the SysEx Commands below

  1. {“cmd”:“set”,“msgid”:7,“data”:{“preset”:{“id”:4,“preset_name”:“Guitar”,“tuning_name”:“Guitar”,“bridgeboard_tuning”:[40,45,50,55,59,64],“fingerboard_tuning”:[48,50,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,50,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,52,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,55,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,57,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,84,60,62,64,67,69,72,74,76,79,81,84,86],“mode”:“fretted_string”,“method”:“strum”,“transpose_step”:1,“arpeggiator”:false,“arpeggiator_subdivider”:8,“string_flip”:“accel_flip”,“fret_pressure_message”:“poly_press”,“bridge_pressure_message”:“none”,“sound_profile”:0,“pressure_sensitivity”:1,“twelve_string”:false,“json_version”:“1.0.1”}}}

  2. {“cmd”:“save”,“msgid”:8,“data”:{“preset”:{“id”:4}}}

I personally don’t know of any more user friendly way to sending raw data to a midi device other than the way I did, but there might be something out there.