Wearables: Revamp the vibrations (shorter duration)#19

the stronger vibrations are also way too long: they should remain strong, but please make them as short as possible! this will definitely improve keeping the tempo.

Hey, thanks for the suggestion! We know for a metronome you want to have vibrations that are as sharp as possible. Unfortunately this is a technical limitation. If you want to generate a stronger vibration, you need to turn the vibration motor a bit longer. We already use a haptic driver to accelerate and break the motor to create the maximum amount of sharpness per vibration strength generated. With todays technology there’s unfortunately a tradeoff of vibration strength & vibration duration! So you’ll have to find the right balance between the two that works for you

Thanks OP, I fully agree.
I assume you’re talking about the Core, though?
For the Pulse, I can tweak length and strength of a vibration independently.

From the top of my head:

• short/medium/long
• weak/medium/strong

All combinations are possible, so 3x3=9 different combos.
This is great for tweaking the feel of the main beat and subdivisions.

However, the Core doesn’t have this level of tweakability: the stronger a vibration, the longer it is!
Florian, are you saying this a hardware limitation of the Core, which the Pulse does not have…?

Hey, the Core and the Pulse use the same vibration motor and haptic driver so their capabilities in that regard are identical. Between the Pulse and the Core, the only thing we changed is the interface in the app, but you are assigning the same vibrations. We simplified the UI in the Core and removed some options that felt identical and provided no value. Sorry for the confusion our UI change caused - we felt it would be more straight forward to line up the different options from weak to powerful. For each vibration strength level we always picked the shortest/most distinct vibration option

From another thread: An accent (for example the first beat of bar) needs to be really short. Now the accented best is extremely broad. No timing whatsoever. Practically an upbeat is blurred with downbeat. (It takes two for tango, of course, but how about tea for two?)

This is really satisfacrory for rehearsing free pulsative music.

To be accurate the pulses and accents needs to be much shorter. Way shorter. And with more impact.

I was really enthusiastic the Soundbrenner metronome when it came out. I had thought about it for years myself, before it was launched, but I didn’t really have the technical skills to pull it off. My idea was to use a solenoid to ‘prod’ myself - mounted in an armband or ankle band. I never got it to work properly - and then I learned about Soundbrenner and I thought ‘great!’ Someone has done it for me! I bought one straight away - but was a bit disappointed. I can play very well to a click track or visible metronome- I’ve been doing it for very many years - but that is a very short click or flash. Instant, momentary, precise. I just can’t get on with the long ‘throb’ of the wearable. Is the beat at the start of the throb? At the end? Somewhere in the middle? At fast tempos it seems to blur together and I just can’t follow it at all. I can’t find a comfortable place to put it, either. Because it is a bit feeble - to feel it, it needs to be on a limb that doesn’t move. Because I play drums, all my limbs move…

So - how about a different design of physical click generation? Something servo driven that delivers a physical touch or prod with a very short duration but definite tactile feel?

Hi @Swreynolds, are you talking about the Pulse or the Core?
Because if you bought a Core, the Pulse might be a better choice for you. You can tweak the vibration into a lot more detail, as I described above.
This is not possible for the Core. Well, physically it’s possible, but the option was removed, as Florian described… I still really don’t understand why - obviously more people suffer from this limitation.
One of the reasons why I returned my Core and kept my Pulse.

P.S.: A chest band is also available for the Pulse, which might work better for a drummer.

Hi, thanks for the reply. I do have the pulse. I still find that even with the vibrations as short and as intense as possible, it still doesn’t seen to work for me. I want the very short, very precise ‘click’ of a metronome.

As for wearing it -I have a chest strap, but the problem with drumming is every part of you tends to move, chest included. I read a post on another thread where some guy says he wears it on his head - in contact with his skull. This does work - but results in an almighty headache at the end of a practice session!

You can also try the back of the neck. We found it is also a really great position and we tried to develop a strap for it but everything felt like a dog collar and was a bit too crazy to make a real product out of it - but feel free to give it a shot.

Regarding the vibrations options, I’m 100% certain between the Pulse and Core we did not remove any meaningful vibration option - just the UI looks different. But I have heard this now a couple of times so I am seriously thinking about going back to the old UI and maybe it could even be worth it to make a few more vibrations available for both the Pulse and the Core if we find any good ones we haven’t used yet - I believe in total there are about 140 options that our hardware supports natively but most of them are not usable…

Sorry for the confusion, my wording was unclear.

As you said, Pulse and Core have identical vibration motor and haptic driver, but the UI for the Core was changed (i.e. strongly simplified) compared to the Pulse.
The ‘old’ UI is far superior in every way, so I rather call it the ‘original’ UI.

Anyway, I expected the Core to be superior (or at least identical in functionality) to the Pulse in every way, so not having those great tweaks anymore, to me, felt like those options were removed… because I desperately needed them.

However, these tweaks technically never existed for the Core, so using the term ‘removing’ was confusing in this context.

Thanks for considering bringing back the original UI (maybe only visible after toggling an ‘Advanced mode’ switch?), although it’s too late for me, unfortunately.