PLAY MODE

Playing a PolyHarp is pretty easy — there are a set of virtual Chord Bars and a set of virtual strings. Each Chord Bar is controlled by a corresponding Chord Button in the interface.

You push a Chord Button to select a chord and strum or tap the virtual strings to play the notes which are in that chord. PolyHarp is multi touch, so you can do some fancy plucking! Not only that, but you can press Chord Buttons simultaneously, which results in chordal dampening (or undampening) effects. If strings are running under the Chord Bars, the Chord Bars have priority if you slide onto or tap them!

You can load different PolyHarps by tapping the name under the word "PolyHarp", which will cause a large dialog box pop up. Read more about this in the Patch section. If you long press on the name, the current PolyHarp will reload.

In the large dialog box, you can load, save, import, export, rename, delete, describe, tag and recolor a PolyHarp. You can set a preferred Base Key and also — this is important — whether the Chord Bars damp the strings, like most Autoharps do, or undamp strings, which makes it more like raising the dampers on a piano.

Multitouch extends also to the Chord Buttons: pressing two or more Chord Buttons on a damped PolyHarp will play only the common strings (the intersection) of the selected chords, and pressing two chords on an "undamped" PolyHarp will add (union) the strings of all the chords. This means you can construct some interesting experiments in polyphony.

There are a few control buttons that control how the Chord Buttons act:

• If Stay Down
  
  Stay Down
  is enabled, Chord Buttons stay down when touched, until you touch a new Chord Bar, or you turn off this feature. Holding does not affect Lock Bar chords, or chords ephemerally locked by using the "Stick-on-4" button.

• 
  Stick-on-4
  If Stick-on-4 is enabled, tapping a Chord Bar 4 times will lock it down like a Lock Bar; tap it four times again to free it up.

  There's one more button, Scrub, which if selected does not ignore the damped strings when played, it plays them, but with a lot of damping, just as felts in a real autoharp do. The Damping slider changes how damped they are. This adds a little authentic noise to the playing, but also, you might be able to work out a way to make the damped "scrubbing" sound on purpose, and with more consonance!

  Chord Button Remote Control

  The Chord Buttons can also be associated with MIDI messages from external controllers, and controlled by Audiobus Remote. See Chord Buttons And Bars for more details.