H-Arp Manual

Installation

Download the installer for Windows or Mac and run through the installation wizard to install.

Next open your DAW and do a plugin re-scan. If all goes well, H-Arp should appear in your plugin instruments list (vendor is RaveyStabs).

Quick Start

The first thing to do is to get H-Arp (a MIDI plugin) set up with a soft synth of your choosing in your DAW. H-Arp triggers other instrument plugins (or hardware) with notes, it makes no sound on its own.

Please see DAW Setup then head back here after successfully set up.

The concept of H-Arp is simple:

• Chords you press on your MIDI keyboard appear in numbered slots in the Notes Pressed area (1 in screenshot above).
• A playhead (2) then starts moving down vertically through rows which correspond to steps 1 to 16 (or 0 to 15).
• The numbers in the grid at each step row correspond to a numbered slot that will be played when arrived at.
  • In the example above, A2 (in slot 1) will play on the first step (00) because there is a 1. C2 (slot 2) will play on the 04 step because a 2 is there, and so on.
  • At step 12 a chord will play since 1, 2 and 3 are beside each other, meaning slots 1, 2 and 3 will play simultaneously (A2 C3 E3).
  • You may vary the notes you press and the rhythmic pattern will play out with a different set of notes.
  • This grid can be edited using the arrow keys and typing in numbers on your qwerty keyboard (and there's lot of shortcuts for copying, duplicating and such).
  • Note priority determines what order the notes appear in the slots. And Note not found determines what happens if there is a number in the grid that is not pressed (what it should fallback to).
• Different patterns can be added and those patterns can be chained together to create longer sequences (4). 
• Click (4) above and select Load Demo Patterns to try some example patterns out.
• Finally the interface is fully resizeable using the handle bottom right and there are two skins (light and dark) to choose from.

This is the fundamental concept of H-Arp - press notes on your keyboard, assign numbers in the grid and see how they play out. Everything else is complementary to this. 

What you play can also be drag & dropped exported to your DAW's timeline for further manipulation, or you can just sequence the arp directly using long notes from your DAW's piano roll.

See the getting started video also for a quick run though:

TODO getting started

Next (when you are ready):

• More about the Notes Pressed area
• More about the Pattern Grid area
• A detailed guide to the entire Interface & Menus