Changing Key in ThumbJam

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hautbois
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:50 am

Changing Key in ThumbJam

Post by hautbois »

I am totally blind, and I am quite frustrated because I cannot find the way to RELIABLY set the key that I want. Granted, I come from the "old knob school" where you had buttons and knobs to set things; but I am trying to learn the touch screen of ThumbJam (I believe I have the latest version from ITunes). I have the key controls shown, but as I move my finger around, I get the controls for octave up/down, octave increase/decrease, and play area. One time I found things such as A-sharp, G-Sharp, D-sharp; but I cannot find the way to RELIABLY get the key that I want, let's say D-Major as an example. My impression of this part of the ThumbJam is that it is not any better than "hocus-pocus." "fumble around enough, and you MIGHT happen to get the instrument in the desired key." Well, I trust that the instrument is not really that bad, but when I read the manual, it referred to COLORS, and as a totally-blind person, COLORS TOTALLY ESCAPE ME! Can anyone give me EXPLICIT step-by-step instructions which will allow a totally-blind person to RELIABLY set the instrument to the desired key? Of course, I could set the scale to Chromatic to give me all the notes of the octave, but that's not really a good way to do it. HELP NEEDED.

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Jesse
Posts: 1053
Joined: Tue Dec 15, 2009 3:25 am

What's making this harder is

Post by Jesse »

What's making this harder is the way that the key controls show up as an overlay on the screen. The VoiceOver functionality will stop announcing them after you touch in the main play area, because it doesn't deal well with overlapping areas.

In landscape orientation, the key controls toggle button is the 2nd from the left along the top, hitting that brings up the overlay. If you move your finger directly down from there you will find the C sharp button (voiceover says "C number"). The rest of the key change buttons are layed out like a piano keyboard from there. As long as you press on the toolbar first you should be able to drag down and discover where they are on the screen. The problem is that once you start playing again, those key buttons won't get announced, but you can still hit them (single taps only then). Of course you don't have any feedback as to which one you've hit, other than hearing the played notes.

If you are using portrait orientation, the key controls overlay is vertically oriented. The key controls toggle button is second from the top on the left sidebar. If you activate it the key controls panel comes up just to the right of that. If you move your finger about half an inch lower than the key controls button and drag it to the right with VoiceOver on you will hit the A sharp note, which is almost at the top of the vertical piano keyboard layout of the keys. Directly below that is G sharp, etc. If you move your finger to the right an inch you will hit the "white keys" column, and you can drag your finger down from there until you get down to C.

Remember, once you've started playing in the play area you'll have to find those key buttons without voiceover feedback, but if you touch on the sidebar first, then you can get voiceover to announce them again by dragging around.

I hope this helps for now!

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