Chiff and Fipple Forums

Just received one of the new "WARBL" MIDI wind controllers from developer and instrument builder Andrew Mowry to evaluate and provide feedback.

https://warbl.xyz

I'm really impressed with this device, very slim and elegant, extremely responsive and software configurable. It's a USB MIDI controller, to connect it to an iOS device you use the USB Camera adapter which plugs into the Lightning port on the iPhone or iPad. Works with any MIDI software.

Here are a couple of demo videos:

Playing the whistle sound in my "Celtic Sounds" iOS app running on my iPad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9D4J8C ... e=youtu.be

Playing the cello sound in Jesse Chappell's "ThumbJam" iOS app running on my iPad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t7cPfQ ... e=youtu.be

The device supports both whistle and bagpipes style fingering and is fully configurable using the online configuration app at:

https://warbl.xyz/configure.html

As a long time EWI player and more recent whistle and NAF player, this is very interesting. I notice there is no anticipated release date or price on the website. Also no details on the MIDI implementation. I'm definitely looking forward to more info on this one.

Hi Jim,

I've forwarded your questions on to Andrew the developer of the device. I think it would be great to have a full MIDI implementation chart as well!

I sent him an email too. Definitely following this with interest

As a beginner I know I am interested.
Being able to practice without bothering the dogs and family would be great.
I can blow over the hole for almost silent practice, but this would be more fulfilling.
The added sounds available through Midi would also be a lot of fun.
Great clips by the way. I loved the cello sound with whistle style.

I've been working on some custom Arduino firmware for the WARBL to add my full iOS app whistle fingering map, and finger vibrato features:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIV5g0a ... e=youtu.be

Sound module is my "Celtic Sounds" iOS sound module app setup as a Bb tin whistle.

Having a great time with this device. Having a completely customizable open-source USB MIDI wind controller is a dream come true for me! Setting up the Arduino IDE environment and required libraries was pretty easy, was up and building firmware in less than an hour.

Wow I want one of these!

I can use it for silent whistle practice and also to trigger samples in my DAW? Sign me up!

I also emailed him

Two questions:
1) Is there a possible way to get a third octave out of the thing? Being able to keep up with fiddlers' G string would be a great trick.

2) Is there a reasonable way to play chromatically?

Pretty sure the answer is yes since it programmable - but might be "some assembly required" in the way of programming. For example there is a thumb hole sensor in addition to the 7 top hole sensors. I don't see why you couldn't use the thumb hole sensor as an octave switch and thus get 3 or even 4 octaves depending on how it was configured.

For chromatic playing, the sensors are supposedly partial sensing so you can "half hole" as on a whistle. But the other possibility is devising fingering patterns not possible on a real whistle to give chromatic notes.

I'm wondering how responsive/sensitive the breath sensor is.

jimhanks wrote:Pretty sure the answer is yes since it programmable - but might be "some assembly required" in the way of programming. For example there is a thumb hole sensor in addition to the 7 top hole sensors. I don't see why you couldn't use the thumb hole sensor as an octave switch and thus get 3 or even 4 octaves depending on how it was configured.

For chromatic playing, the sensors are supposedly partial sensing so you can "half hole" as on a whistle. But the other possibility is devising fingering patterns not possible on a real whistle to give chromatic notes.

I'm wondering how responsive/sensitive the breath sensor is.

Yes that's right--you could program it all sorts of ways. I'm also wondering how sensitive it can be. The software snaphots on the website show a wide range of sensitivity adjustment for the pressure sensor. It'd be interesting to see how this would do triggering sax samples.

PB+J wrote:It'd be interesting to see how this would do triggering sax samples.

I'm sure it would be fine just triggering samples but that's not where the magic of breath control comes from. You need to get the breath *doing* something - like controlling a filter, or pitch, or volume, noise level, brightnesss, etc. - or all the above at once. If all you're doing is triggering samples, you might as well be playing a keyboard.

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.

Hmm, breath sensor definitely need to be sending CC2 or Afterouch or something like that for it to be worthwhile in my book. If it can do that at a reasonable sample rate, this could be a very versatile platform indeed.

I’ve let Andrew know about this thread so perhaps he’ll jump in at some point.

I would trade breath control for good whistle emulation—the octave jump would be enough, anything else would be gravy. I’d hate to see it held up chasing down a rabbit hole.

I usually trigger samples with a guitar, using a fishman pickup. It’s ok on dynamics, lousy on pitch bending