To be clear, I’m not the developer of the device, but really enjoying working with it.
Right now, the breath control just starts/stops the sounds via MIDI note on/off events, and can detect octave switching via pressure changes. It’s very fast. You can set up the three physical buttons on the bottom to do all sorts of features including octave up/down. You cannot play three octaves just based on breath pressure with the current firmware other than getting to the third octave D. It has several fingering tables built in for whistle, GHB, Uilleann, and Northumbrian pipes.
The real beauty of this device is that the Arduino-based firmware is open source and the developer provides the source code on his website. The build tools are also open source and free.
I have already modified the firmware to use my iOS iPad app fingerings for the device in whistle fingering mode to add several chromatic notes, modified the entire pitch bend system to allow for finger vibrato, modified the octave switching breath control response methodology to the point now that it truly feels like playing a physical whistle. I’m contributing my changes back to Andrew Mowry the developer of the device, perhaps he’ll incorporate them into the final product as options.
Use of the optical sensors for partial hole coverage bending I think will need some more firmware refinement for many players to truly find it useful. The problem is that when you bend a note to another you eventually have to determine if you need to trigger a new MIDI note on event, which causes most MIDI devices to play the new note from the beginning of the sample. To me that sounds odd, so in the customizations I did for the firmware, I ignore the optical partial coverage bending in favor of supporting finger vibrato ability. The end result, as I demonstrated in the video I posted earlier, is very effective and would feel immediately familiar to any whistle or Uilleann pipes player. I’ll be happy to make my firmware changes available to anyone who wants them. At some point I may dive in and see what I can do with the partial coverage bending, but I don’t miss it after my firmware changes.
Of course, anyone is welcome to dive in and make it behave any way you like with your own custom firmware, so if you don’t like the defaults and have some programming skills, you can make it behave any way you want. One could certainly add code that uses the breath pressure sensor data to send custom MIDI control information, the current firmware just isn’t setup to do that yet.
I’ve also been able to scape and modify his web-based feature customization UI (runs on Chome which supports Web MIDI), so if you modify the firmware, you could also modify the configuration page.
