Time for a Misha Thread

Hello,

The 4MS POD 32 is a good choice for a simple case for Misha. You can get the POD with a power supply installed already (you will also need to purchase a power adapter for the POD) – https://4mscompany.com/p.php?p=974

Note that Misha is a 28 HP module and this case gives you 32 HP of space. You could fill up the rest of the space with other small modules, or blank panels.

You will also need a TRS > DIN Type A adapter to connect to MIDI devices with DIN inputs – https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/0-COASTMidi–make-noise-0-coast-midi-cable-1-8-inch-trs-to-5-pin-midi?mrkgadid=1000000&mrkgcl=28&mrkgen=gdsa&mrkgbflag=0&mrkgcat=accessories&acctid=21700000001645388&dskeywordid=39700064887253108&lid=39700064887253108&ds_s_kwgid=58700007229425432&device=c&network=g&matchtype=&adpos=largenumber&locationid=9003597&creative=532125732701&targetid=aud-570170767352:dsa-1366322260300&campaignid=6730319014&awsearchcpc=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw0oyYBhDGARIsAMZEuMt_TTc02uhbyQEaDLupZSjZV6R31u-XwZncMoocji7xIy3iVF3gdakaAkV9EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Thank you for the informative reply! I snagged a powered 4ms with a power supply, this is exactly what I was looking for. Misha arrives on Thursday, and I’m already booked at the Royal Albert Concert Hall to perform endless space jazz solos on Friday, it’s just that good! xD

I only have two thoughts going forward:

1) Using this only as a controller for my midi keyboard, are there any good 4hp or 2x2hp Eurorack modules that would make sense to add? Since I have the space in the pod, what kind of stuff could I do to expand the functionality of the Misha?

2) Misha just launched, so I don’t expect this anytime soon, but I’m hoping that future firmware versions will improve the chords function. First would be raise the limit on the 3-note chords to 7th, 9th etc chords. But more importantly, I want to be able to select the exact chord with my left hand on the left part of the midi keyboard I’m performing with. So that I can still use my right hand to move up and down in intervals, but use my left hand as a modifier to switch between chord types on-the-fly. OR! Just be able to play chords freely wiht my left hand with the intelligence that Misha brings to my right hand. I hope this makes sense. I know you can map keys to different functions, so maybe you can already do this, but I’ve only seen -1/+1 chord program options in the manual, so presumably, the way it is now I’d have to flip through 4-5 different chords to land on the one I want at the moment, right? I’d love a mapping for a 61-key keyboard where I can start training my muscle memory to directly select the chord types on the left hand. And again, maybe this can already be done, I’ll have to dig around once it arrives.

Very stoked for this product, I’ve been dreaming of exactly this for over 25 years. I’m a  drummer, so I’m pretty clueless when it comes to keys, modes, scales etc. But I understand intervals, they speak to me, and are more universal IMO. Amazing work bringing this to market Eventide, and to Steve De Furia for his excellent work!

Hello –

Thanks for writing, glad you got a case and power for your Misha.

Regarding #1: To fill up that little bit of space we recommend the Expert Sleepers Disting Mk4. It’s kind of a Swiss Army knife for the Eurorack world. You can use its multisample playback algorithm to play sounds which are triggered via MIDI by Misha (though it’s monophonic so they won’t be chords). And if you are getting sounds from elsewhere you can use it instead for its clock or processing, etc.

Regarding #2: If you look at page 31 of the user guide, you will see a list of the nine chords in Misha. The first chords are octaves and triad types, but starting at “Jazz” and up you have a few that have 7ths, 9ths etc. See if you like any of those once you are set up. In future, we hope to expand on the chord selection, to allow user-created chords, etc.

And actually what you describe as far as left and right-hand performance should be doable. If you look on page 44 of the manual you will see a complete list of the options in MIDI/MIDI Mapping/MIDI Note. You are correct that you can increment or decrement the chord with a remote MIDI command. But you can select a chord by name this way, as well. Also if you have a keyboard with buttons which send CC#’s you could in theory use those to send the chord changes and use the entire MIDI range for Misha interval performance.

Well, when you get set up and try it out let us know how it went and whether you have more questions.

Thanks

Leon
Eventide

Hey, thank you for the comprehensive reply. Your avatar is the same that Loopop mentioned in his video, are you the originator of this whole concept?

I was not aware that the “jazz” chords have more than 3 notes each, that’s great. And yes, it would always be nice to have more, but that seems like low-hanging fruit for firmware updates, so I’m very content to see what comes up.

I was also not aware that you could map a chord “name” directly, this is huge. I was an early adopter of the “Theoryboard” which turned out to be hot garbage, but I’ve still clung to that core promise of selecting chords with my left hand, and playing melodies with my right hand, all while never knowing a thing about music theory 🙂 I’m going to try a mapping where on the left part of the keyboard the black keys are the chord “name” and the white keys are the root note of the chord, I just need to figure out where to map scale so it makes sense…

What I’m not sure I can do is play them at the same time as what my right hand is doing at the top of the keyboard. Ideally, I could jam with my left hand in the same fashion I do with my right hand, and the chord type and key I pick with my left hand will instruct the intervals I’m playing with my right hand. I think that makes sense. Basically take Steve’s NAMM video, where he arranged the backing track to do all those nice chord changes, but was riffing on top of it live. I want to do the same, but control the key/scale and chord with my left hand in real-time instead of setting up CC messages to trigger the Misha to change to the right key/scale.

The Misha seems to be the secret weapon for everything from synth solos, to shredding lead guitar licks at 900mph. I hope that this philosophy can be expanded simultaneously with a dedicated chord section for my left hand. ESPECIALLY being able to trigger the key/scale of several midi tracks at one, so I could alter the backing track of say a Bass, Strings, and Piano at the same time. HUUUGE! It seems like a lot of it is already there, I just have to try the mappings and see what works and what doesn’t.

I haven’t been this excited for a piece of gear in a long time. I’ve invested so much in hardware to make my music sound amazing, but it doesn’t improve the input, garbage in, garbage out! The bottleneck has always been between my two ears. I’m hoping Misha breaks this paradigm. Two more sleeps!

Yes- the Misha did come from the core “intervalllic” concepts of my creation Samchillian, which I’ve been working with for 30 years or so 🙂

Lest there is any confusion: all chords currently have 3 notes. This was done because there are 3 CV outs, but there’s no reason to constrain the number to 3 for MIDI, so we hope to expand on that in future. I think you will have to hear some of the less triad-y sounding chords to see if they suit your purposes. Chords in Misha are possibly a different concept than what might be expected- they are built down off the melody note, rather than up from a root. Best probably to play with it to understand.

And currently, you pick one MIDI channel to use. We do have plans to add more tracks to the sequencer, though, so in theory this could involve multiple MIDI channels. Not clear to me though how you would want to do this live, though

At any rate, I think you will need to see what Misha does and take it from there.

I thought of the same thing as you using Misha as stand alone with minimal setup, so I got a Tiptop fly bus power from Amzn, and

just find a DC switching wall wart laying around (need 2.5mm inner hole plug, center positive), I have tried a 9V DC, and a 12VDC both works for tiptop power, and both worked for driving Misha.

I then used made a small wood frame to host the tiptop power module and Misha, and put in a suitcase, I bought a 5V USB step up cable to 12V DC, was able to put in suitcase, and whole thing powered by a 8,000mAh power bank.

I think you mean less CV, lol. Waste of space if you ask me. But I’m not gonna be using it as a sequencer, or with Eurorack gear.  I’ll stick with Ableton for easy sequencing and editing to actually turn ideas into tracks. I’m more into Misha as a performance tool, as it stands alone in live applications. I use Scaler 2 for finding dope chord progressions, but the weakest part of my productions has been lead melodies, which the Misha just knocks out of the park. Did you try it with a midi keyboard (or QWERTY keyboard) yet? Seems like it’s a totally different beast if you try playing it that way. The Torso T-1 might be more up your alley if you want a pure sequencer that does algorithm stuff though. It’s got a lot of cool stuff going on, but still ends up sounding robotic at the end of the day, which isn’t what I’m going for. Put the performance back in music!

Oh, also you don’t need a screensaver, it’s a LCD screen, not an OLED. It shouldn’t burn-in. I think Loopop mentioned it’s an LCD with good viewing angles, not an OLED in his review.

Well, I definitely do mean more to do with CV inputs and outputs. It does not interface with Eurorack well, it just happens to be Eurorack.

I imagine that the first firmware updates will probably target the sequencing capabilities, but probably won’t replace your NDLR. To me, this is the perfect compliment to something like a NDLR or T-1. I’d let the NDLR arrange the “backing track” and you can *ACTUALLY noodle with the Misha better than anything I’ve ever used. Grab a guitar VST and use a midi keyboard, and it’s just surreal. It’s basically cheating. I know nothing about music theory, but I can shred like someone who’s literally spent 40 years learning their instrument. IMO before you send it back you owe it to yourself to check it out with a midi keyboard. I’ll admit that the sequencing feels uninspired at the moment, but the live performance capabilities are just godlike. I’ve had mine for 24 hours, and I already sound like a virtuoso. If I actually practice with it, I’ve never been so confident that I can learn this instrument. This is my new secret weapon.

Thanks

So yeah, the way it works is that each incoming MIDI note is assigned to one of the many Misha functions available, shown on page 44 of the user guide. They are all treated the same – so you could assign “+3” to a particular MIDI note, or you could assign a particular chord, say.

Regarding chords, you turn the chord off by assigning the chord name “Off” and triggering that. (You can also assign a MIDI note to trigger stepping one up or down from the last chord selected; or a random chord.)

Not out of the question to add a second MIDI channel for control, but I’m not clear exactly what you are hoping to achieve here. Are you interested in ‘passing through’ some MIDI notes? Even if so, it seems to me in, say, SirParcival’s map, you use three octaves for Misha functions and still have plenty of other MIDI notes available. I realize on a drum kit you don’t have nearly that number of MIDI Notes available, but on the other hand you can get to the entire range of MIDI with one pad, so I’m not sure what it is you want here.

Also regarding standard note mappings – not quite sure what you are saying. Can you elaborate?

MIDI over USB is definitely on our list to add.

Re process vs control – lets say I have one midi controller that I just want the notes remapped to the misha scale end to end and not have some notes in the middle octaves do Misha control changes.

Something I wanted to try using Max or Pure Data was to have one keyboard, like a small QuNexus, change the keys or notes for a larger one that I could play more freely.

Is this clearer?

I think you can do that now, for instance I’ve also mapped my Maschine Mikro Mk3 to send note data to the Misha, alongside my midi keyboard.

On my picture all of the white keys to the left of the default mapping, I’m going to make the first octave the KEY select, and then the remaining keys I’m going to make CHORD select. I think you could do this using a secondary controller too, just like the NAMM 2022 video that Steve did, he was using a Novation Launchpad I believe to select the KEY. Perhaps it’s because the midi routing is going through a DAW which makes it possible, but you can probably do the same using 5-pin DIN MIDI thru.

And an idea for your V-drums, perhaps you can change each pad to only have say 3 or 4 velocity layers in the drum brain, and then have them mapped to different MIDI notes, so you could get more functionality out of each pad. I have a TD-20 in the basement, and your video makes me want to break it out, but I’m already waiting on a Torso T-1 to arrive which I want to merge with the Misha first. My idea is getting the Torso T-1 to handle “backing track” duties, and then somehow use the Misha to send MIDI CC or note data to the T-1 to control all of the melodic tracks in the T-1. So the idea is I select the Key and Scale on the Misha (using my MIDI keyboard), and this will change the Key and Scale of the T-1 melodic tracks, so I can effectively jam out like you can with a modern Casio keyboard with their “backing track” feature, where you can have a small ensemble playing loops, but you can change the key they’re in using the notes on the left-side of the midi keyboard.

Oh ok – yeah, I guess I imagining you were going to use only drum pads for everything, and it wouldn’t be possible to have so many of those to make it necessary to need another channel.

Still, because of the interval-based way of doing things, it’s hard to imagine needing more than, say -14 to +14 = 29 movement keys, so it still seems to me even as things are currently implemented with one MIDI channel, those could be, say, assigned to the upper range of the 127 MIDI notes available, and that would leave more than enough keys on the bottom part to do control changes, no?

It’s possible I’m still not completely getting what you write. When you say, “to have one keyboard, like a small QuNexus, change the keys or notes for a larger one that I could play more freely”, I guess you mean the small QuNexus would do control changes and then the larger keyboard would do the interval moves? I don’t think you need a particularly large keyboard for your Misha movements, though. Unless the larger keyboard is also for ‘pass through’ events? And there’s no drum pads in this scenario, right?

Anyway, I can see some advantage to separating the two into different MIDI Channels.  Another approach is what Steve De Furia does in his demos, which is to put some control type stuff into CC #’s, using buttons or sliders that are typically found on a MIDI controller. The MIDI/Midi Mapping/MIDI CC menu is identical to the MIDI/Midi Mapping/MIDI Note one, so you can assign those as you would MIDI Notes. CC’s are typically continuous values, as you know, but in this case they are for on/off events – i.e., any time the value is on or above 64 it triggers an event.

Ah – OK, maybe I’m misunderstanding something very basic about how Misha works.  Outside the control notes that play intervals and are mapped to misha functions, what does it it do?

I was under the impression that it remapped notes in different octaves to the scale selected.  So I have this idea in my mind that one keyboard could control the scale and root note, and another would play whatever note is closest to a scale to that note.  So basically quantize notes to the scale.  But perhaps it’s not that at all.

Also, I like the suggestion of mapping a few velocities and trying that.  I’ll try that.

Yeah – there is no ‘quantize’ type function in the way you are describing, that is to say no way to pitch-quantize notes played in an “absolute”way – everything is based on intervallic movement in relation to the prior note.

Just to briefly describe the “Move” assignments available – see these in the MIDI/MIDI Mapping/MIDI Note assignment menu:

<b>Move
</b>Interval changes of pitch (-14->+14 , plus various other ‘moves’, such as chromatic step, undo, same, etc). Almost all of these land you in the current key and scale.  And with one exception, all perform movements relative to the previous note.  The only one in the ‘Move” type of the assignment menu that isn’t relative in this way is “Home”

The other categories – “Chr Shift”, “Scale”, “Key Sig”, “Chords”, “Special”, “Play” – either make a change to the harmonic ‘environment’ or are concerned with sequencer functions.

Thanks for sharing – great to see some drummer-controlled Misha!

Hello –

Actually, currently Misha will not respond to MIDI clock – it’s on a priority list to be implemented soon, though.

I’ve synced Misha with Ableton myself, but with the addition of an external converter unit, such as this one, which takes incoming MIDI clock and converts to a clock pulse which I sent to Misha’s Clock In.

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MIDI2Clk–erica-synths-midi-to-clock-module-v2-eurorack-module (Actually I see this is no longer available, but I’m sure there is something similar one can find.)

I’m glad to hear it’s high on the list for future updates Leon. I was looking at something like that, considering a 4hp module to fill out the rest of the ms 32 case, but if you guys are going to implement it anyways in Misha, I’ll just wait on the update. It turned out that I’m very happy the Misha has trig/gate outputs, even though when I bought it I didn’t care cause I don’t use modular. I just bought an Erica Synths Acidbox III, and it only accepts tempo from a Trig/Gate output, which I tested and actually works 100% with Misha, so that’s cool. Is there a rough ETA on when this will come in a firmware update?

I’m sorry but we cannot provide a timeline for when this may be added

Hello –

If I am correctly understanding what you are looking for, at present Misha can’t function as a clock module the way you want.  I.e., you don’t want Misha in automated tone row playing mode, but want it to send out a clock pulse.

What you really need is another module to send out the analog clock to the Erica Synths module. And if you want it to send to both Misha and the Erica Synths module (but maybe you don’t?  I get the feeling you are using Misha strictly as a ‘live’ instrument, yes?), you’d either need a multiplier to send both those signals, or that module would need to be able to send out to both devices.

We recommend the Disting Mk4 for this purpose – it’s only 4hp, not expensive and it does many, many different things, but among them is a clock algorithm, which can also be driven by MIDI clock from a computer, e.g..  And you can send two clock outputs with it, if you need, plus they can be at different clock divisions from each other, which can be useful.

I realize it’s yet another module to add in there, but Misha wasn’t designed to serve as a master clock.  Having said that, I’ll make a note of this suggested feature for future, as I can see it would be desirable in your case.

Leon

Re-reading what you wrote, I am realizing you must be sending in a pulse to Misha’s Clock In already, meaning something else is the master clock. So you had just hoped Misha could ‘pass through’ the clock. Unfortunately Misha doesn’t do that.

But really all you need then is a ‘multiplier’, which takes in a pulse and outputs it to multiple destinations

Here’s one: intellijel mult – 2 hp and very inexpensive

Thanks for your suggestion, it was what actually led me to try plugging the clock output from my other gear directly into the Acidbox. I just had to change the pulse timing from 24 to 1, and it acts like a metronome now. So you ended up leading me to the right solution, wikkid. I didn’t know that a clock and a trig/gate whatever are basically the same thing. I really don’t know anything about modular stuff.

Oh ok, great!

Well, I wanted also to mention that if in future you did also want to send the same clock pulse to Misha, you might have success with something even simpler than the multiplier I mentioned. You might be able just to use a Y cable which also would split the signal in two- whether it works is dependent on the current of the devices concerned.

Anyway, what I’m getting from you is that for the time being you want to use Misha strictly as a live instrument with no pulse, which is fine.

Where do you see it?

I assumed it would be on the downloads page, but it’s not (at least not that I can see)

You need to use the Eventide Device Manager.

Once you do that and you follow the steps in the manual to enter update mode for the Misha (hold user 1 + the down button while booting up your rack with the micro USB cable plugged in). You will see the available firmware versions there and can update.

See page 51 of the PDF manual for specifics.

Hello,

The changelog can be found here: https://www.eventideaudio.com/forums/topic/misha-firmware-1-00-04/

We’ll update that post whenever a new firmware update is available.

Awesome! Thank you.