Got it this morning. I’ve had a chance to put in a few hours with it.
It’s really cool! It works as advertised. Hooks up to your computer quickly and easily. I’ve used it with a laptop, an ipad, and a smartphone. I also tried it as a midi trigger, using sax and flute samples.
How does it sound? First, it only sounds as good as the samples or software you use it with. Michael Eskin’s “Celtic Sounds” is very reasonably priced and sounds good. It sounds like a whistle.
How does it play? A lot like a whistle–not 100% but very close. It can do vibrato and it can “slide” between notes. It has a lot of parameters you can tweak, like how much air pressure it takes to jump to the second octave. You can set the air pressure sensor to add dynamics, so it gets louder or softer as you blow harder or softer. It’s really great with sax samples.
Used as a whistle it’s very precise and somewhat unforgiving–I needed to play more carefully. But it lays like a whistle and with a little bit of tweaking it has a lot of the expressiveness of a whistle.
One note–I tried it with my phone and wireless headphones, because my phone doesn’t have a mini jack. The latency was too great to work. I assume this was the fault of the bluetooth connection, because it’s not a problem at all with wired headphones.
I’l try to get some sound clips up. So far I’m really pleased and impressed with it
Only if the sample library or software it triggers have that quality.
WARBL only triggers pre-existing sounds, it doesn’t generate any sounds on its own.
So for example Michael Eskin’s “celtic sounds” sound set, for IOS, behaves differently from the Native
Instruments Irish whistle sample library that I use with Logic Pro. Native focused on airiness and “chiff” at the expensive of sliding. Michael Eskin’s soundset, which I think is maybe generated by software rather than recorded samples, does “slides” much more effectively. If I wanted to make a realistic sounding whistle recording using WARBL, I might double the midi track and play both simultaneously. Both of those appear to be pitch corrected, but I haven’t checked it closely. If I wanted to simulate that behavior I’d maybe add it after recording by slightly sharping higher notes. I’ll check it today if I get a chance. There are other Irish whistle sample libraries that claim to be more realistic.
WARBL does require more pressure to jump into, and stay in, the second octave. How much more is adjustable in the software. It doesn’t have a whistle mouthpiece, just a tube. You could probably adapt a whistle mouthpiece to fit, though
I just did some more experimenting with the “celtic whistle” sample set that comes with Logic Pro. It’s much better for “slides” than the Native Instruments library. But it’s hard to play a quick reel with clarity and the slides tend to take a more time to develop. I don’t know actually if this is WARBL or the sample library software, or the fault of my technique.
WARBL isn’t exactly like a whistle but it’s pretty close
As PB+J said, this depends on the sound module, but the WARBL can be configured to send pitch bend as a function of pressure and this is adjustable. It is very configurable for different purposes - whistle, pipes, wind controller. Personally, the “breath to pitch” characteristic is one aspect of “real” instruments that I’m usually trying to get away from when I use a wind controller.
PB+J: Bluetooth is notorious for high latency.Fine if you’re just playing mp3s but yeah, not good for playing along. You must have got one of the first production units. I’m a beta tester and mine isn’t coming til this week or next. So jealous.
Yes you’re right–I was thinking of air pressure as an expressive tool when i was using it to trigger sax samples, focusing on volume changes. But it could be set up to mimic sharping with more pressure. it’s right there in the software.
it’s really a pretty brilliant little tool. I’m going on trip to work shortly and am planning to bring it with me, for silent practice and learning tunes without offending my Air B+B neighbors
The WARBL website has a demo video showing a cool hack by Gerard Kilbride - a Susato mouthpiece mounted over the regular tubular mouthpiece. Looks fairly easy.
This morning I woke up at five am and went down and sat on the porch with WARBL, an ipad, and some headphones and taught myself “the Fermoy Lasses” while family and neighbors slept on undisturbed. By the time the sun came up, tune learned.
It’s really well thought out. The software interface is great–I’ve only begun to experiment with what it can do. I’ve got the air pressure adjusted the way I like, and it behaves in the second register the way I like, and I’ve disabled the buttons for use as a whistle, for now. I tried the Uilleann pipes settings and using Eskin’s “celtic sounds” program and it was too much fun. I kept thinking “stop now before you have to explain why you just ordered a set of what?!”
Michael Eskin’s app is really well done. You can tell he plays the whistle in ITM. I have a bunch of other whistle sample libraries and they all seem to have been designed to be triggered with a keyboard, so the articulations are odd.
Mine came yesterday too. We’ve got company so I haven’t had much time to play with it, but I plugged it into my Mac, and once I figured out I could run the WARBL configuration in a Chrome Window I was off and running. (Think it’s just sending the notes to the Garage Band instance I already had running.)
My iPad is in the shop (very bad timing there) so I have’t had a chance to try it with that.
On the WARBL, using the tin whistle fingering, try the “Slide and Vibrato” setting with the “Custom Vibrato” switch turned on and see if you like that response. It’s a custom finger vibrato system I designed for the device.
It doesn’t have to be small at all since the samples are all in the iOS app. It would be a different story if the samples were in the WARBL, it only has 32 KBytes of flash.
In the Celtic Sounds app, there are over 100 MB of 44.1 Khz 16-bit mono uncompressed .WAV samples in total. The whistle samples alone are about 25 MB.
My Warbl came today.I was able to fiddle around with it a bit in chrome on a windows PC, but that’s a crude interface for playing and it isn’t a fully featured midi environment.
My ipad usb to lightning kit comes tomorrow, so I’ll be able to get a more thorough look at the thing then.
Right, that’s just for configuration and basic function checks. If you want a breath controlled synth on the PC, you might consider Respiro: https://www.imoxplus.com/site/
But that’s really only if you’re going to use the expression aspect. It won’t be a good “whistle replacement”
Andrew is making these values the defaults for the vented tube whistle thresholds in the next version of the firmware and I believe now if you set defaults on the latest configuration page.
I was gonna ask if you had some config tips Your videos with the warbl are pretty good.
The threshholds you have are close to what I came up with on my own playing with the thing in Chrome, but I decided to quit fiddling with it and fine tune things after getting my ipad hardware.
Your videos with the warbl are pretty good.