So today's experiment involves hooking up the bells to the right edge of each key and the church organ to the left edge of each key. They both have pitch bend on the vertical axis, and the breath pipe and the slide are hooked to various aspects of the organ model, so you can kind of blow to inflate the room. Now the result of all of this is that (a) I can by wobbling to keys make the most inharmonious wailing clanging noises, and (b) that by accidentally dropping the controller business side down I can get a dozen copies of that effect at the same time. Quite suddenly.

I am having fun.

Eventually, my plan is to be musical. But for now, it is just the best method of annoying the neighbours and terrifying their cat in the history of neighbour annoying and/or cat terrifying.

(Gotta figure out how to get the breath pipe connected to the bell parameters, though. The bell is on a different piece of synthesis software, and I haven't yet figured out how the routing really works.)

The actual reason my new laptop is a Macbook Pro is this. A device with which someone infinitely more competent than I has managed to do this after having one for a total of a week (the crucial point being that only the drum loop is pre-recorded).

As for me, I'm happily playing around with my copy, mostly in clarinet mode. I have a key mapping that is trivial to memorise, a breath controller, and pitch bends by wobbling the keys in the obvious manner - after two days of an hour or two here and there it's already converging cognitively with my whistling. I can play things out of my head with tolerable expression and only the odd bum note when my fingers forget what I told them.

And this from someone who gave up on the piano before they let me press two keys at the same time.

Seriously, for once the future has arrived. This is exactly what I imagined as the 'right' synthesiser controller as a kid. Except for the breath pipe, I didn't think of that, and I love it.

So now I'm waiting for the new year when they plan to open up the control interface software to the inquisitive. There's more than just pitches I want to bend....

That said, I'm not quite recommending it quite yet; the software is still a bit wonky at times. Sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for the next download....

Ah, yes, and if you're wealthy, here's the big brother.

For reasons I'm not yet going to go in to, my new laptop is a Macbook Pro.

Holy crap.

We'll see what it's like to live with, but the preliminary impression? Snow Leopard is ready for prime time.

I mean, it's not as seamless as I'd like, but it leaves Windows 7 and Ubuntu in the dirt. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you'd (ahem) pay money for.

And it doesn't seem to assume anymore that I am my granny. The new zero-button mouse is in fact an infinity button mouse, and everything seems to understand it....

Of course, Apple are famous for out-of-box. Sigh - memories of Newton. We'll see how long the honeymoon lasts this time.