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neilbaldwin

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neilbaldwin
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http://marmotaudio.co.uk
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  • Focused Zooming In On Track

    If your Track is longer than 16 steps and the zoom level is greater than 16ths, zooming in on the track always takes you into the first 16 steps.

    It would be way cooler if you could hold a pad on a Track in zoomed out mode and then when you zoom in it actually zooms into the section that contains the pad you're holding.

    Does that make sense?

  • V3 Cheat Sheet, Iconized

    (cross posted from Reddit group)

    Deluge Cheat Sheet for V3 onwards. I tried to keep it all iconized where possible. The principle is that each key is represented by an icon and is augmented with an action icon. Key combinations taken from the latest version of the user manual. Not everything is represented, I just picked the ones I thought were the most useful or the easiest to forget! :smile:

    I designed it to print as an A4 sheet but obviously you could scale it down (or up!) to suit your needs.

    Edit: 5th October 2019. New improved version. More commands, tidier layout and also a small legend/key/guide section to hopefully help.

  • Did anyone replace the deluge wood cheeks with 3D printed - colourful - ones?

    I removed mine, trimmed them down a bit (with a wood file) and painted them black (and replaced the knobs with silver ones).

  • Mixed Bag of Ideas!

    First off, apologies for dumping all of this in one post and apologies if I (or other people) have suggested these before. I'd been keeping electronic notes as I explored the Deluge and I looked at the notes today and realised it had started to get a bit long so I thought I'd just dump the lot on here.

    Here goes! As always, these are just my opinions and they're intended to be constructive to promote discussion that will hopefully make the Deluge even better. Feel free to disagree or if there's any you'd like me to clarify then just reply in the thread.

    Sequencing : General

    1) Option to turn off the audio when pressing matrix pads. That way you can program stuff without it sounding and then you hear it on the next loop (or as the playhead reaches it)

    2) Velocity Editing - remember the last velocity setting you modified with X knob so that the next note you enter doesn’t default to 65. Remember this on a per-row basis (for kits) and per-track for synths.

    3) ‘Ghost notes’ - notes which don’t re-trigger envelopes etc. This could be done by holding a matrix pad and then tapping shift. Existing notes can be turned into ‘ghost notes’ by holding the note on the matrix and tapping shift. This will toggle between ‘normal’ and ‘ghost’ notes. Ghost Notes can also be used to lock synth parameters like a normal note. They could appear dark grey in the matrix (for example).

    4) Option to prevent Deluge from automatically extending a track when you place a sample that is longer than the current track length.

    5) When zoomed out on a track that is longer than 16 16ths, you should be able to zoom in on a particular section by holding a note then pressing and turning the X knob. It should zoom in so that the note you are holding moves towards the left-hand side of the matrix.

    6) Option for a ‘follow mode’ where the display follows the playback position.

    7) External MIDI kits would be very useful. Set OSC type to ‘MIDI’ then Transpose becomes either an absolute MIDI note number or an offset from C3.

    8) A way to alter the length of a note in the same way you can alter the velocity: hold the note then PRESS+ROTATE the X knob (currently unassigned).

    Sequencing: Kits

    9) Hold Audition pad on a row and rotate X knob to affect all velocities on that row. This should be a relative adjustment, left to decrease current value on each step, right to increase.

    Sequencing: Synth

    10) In keyboard mode, holding a key and turning the Y knob doesn’t update the MIDI note name as it does when you’re not in keyboard mode.

    11) Keyboard mode and non-keyboard mode vertical position should keep in sync. Currently, you can Y scroll one or the other and they get out of alignment meaning you could practice something in keyboard mode, switch back to step programming and the octave will be different.

    12) Holding a sequencer pad in step mode and turning the Y knob doesn’t update the display of the MIDI note as it does if you hold an audition pad.

    Synth Editing

    13) For sample-based oscillators it would be better to have the oscillator volume range from -25 to +25 (with 0 being ‘max’) That way if you have a quiet sample you can make it louder than ‘max’ to compensate.

    Kit Editing

    14) Option to turn off auto-preview of samples in the file browser. You should also be able to preview the currently highlighted sample (in file browser mode) by pressing the current row pad.

    15) When in parameter editing mode, pressing an Audition pad should take you to a different drum but stay in the same parameter e.g. if you are editing the Filter Frequency of your snare, without having to back out, pressing the Audition pad of your kick should enable you to edit the Filter Frequency of your kick drum.

    Sampling / Sample Editing

    16) Need a way to monitor sampling input prior to sampling. My suggestion would be to change the process used to record a sample:

    1st press (shift+record) = enable input monitoring
    2nd press = start sampling
    3rd press = stop sampling

    17) Start and End should be changed to Start and Length so that the End value is actually relative to the Start value. That way you can easily mark a section of a large sample and scrub through it by modifying the Start point. Currently, to do this you have to edit both the Start and End points to maintain the distance between them.

    18) When using the X knob to edit the Start or End of a sample, play sample automatically to preview the Start/End change. For Start, play the first 1 second (maybe have the length as a Setup option) and for End point play 0.5 seconds before end time.

    19) Use modulation sources to modulate Start/End parameters.

    20) Ability to record step values/automation to modify sample Start End.

    General

    21) Playhead white cursor needs independent brightness.

    22) On a track that is longer than the current display zoom level shows, some way of indicating which ‘page’ of the track you are on. Haven’t thought of a good idea for this yet!

    23) Option to set default Sample Mode when loading or recording new samples.

    24) Arpeggio mode that doesn’t re-trigger envelopes etc. for every generated note.

    25) 0 to 50 for parameters is quite an odd choice of values. 0 to 64 might be better as it divides down by two easier.

  • V3 Cheat Sheet, Iconized

    Another new version. Sorry for anyone that's printed and laminated it! :smile:

    • I spotted a couple of mistakes (still!) so they're fixed now
    • It bugged me that I'd built the function lists just randomly as I thought of them and I realised it made it quite difficult to scan the text for a particular feature/function. New version is alphabetically sorted(ish) with the fuction preceded by the sub-function name. It's not 100% consistent but it's much improved.

  • Gold Knobs Should Be Able To Apply Negative Modulation

    Currently parameters such as LFO depth can be set from -50 to +50 but if you assign this parameter to one of the gold knobs you can only apply positive amounts when recording automation. This behavior should change so that the middle setting of the gold knob is 0 (2 lights on), fully anti-clockwise (0 lights on) should be -50 and fully clockwise (all lights on) should be +50

    ( I tried searching for this request and while there was a couple of discussions nobody seemed to have explicitly asked for this)

  • Multi-sampling/ velocity layering

    You can already do it a bit on kits. I just posted this on the Facebook group:

    Nice little 'velocity mapping' you can do on kits.
    Assign a snare to OSC 1. Assign a different snare to OSC 2.
    Set the volume of OSC1 and OSC 2 to 25.
    Map VELOCITY to the Volume of OSC1 @ -50 and then map it to OSC2 @ +50
    Stick some snares down on a track. Hold the pad and turn the X knob to change velocity. The lower the velocity the more the snare on OSC1 will be heard. The higher the velocity the more you'll hear the snare on OSC2.

  • Some New Synth Drums (Synths) and Kits

    I'm currently working on a full drum sound pack along these lines: 100 drums, 100% synth engine. It should be ready for release soon.

    I'm also working on a GUI version of my synth kit building tool. Hopefully both will be ready at the same time but I'm having to do some DEEP Python learning to make the GUI version 🤣

  • V3 Cheat Sheet, Iconized

    New version with a slightly different layout (sorry!) so I could fit a few more functions in. Includes the note repeat and note shift functions from V3.1

  • Important information on our new focus on these forums and the temporary removal of feature requests

    @Kenoubi said:

    What I would LOVE to see from Synthstrom is a "major" Deluge firmware update that has NO flagship feature launches... no handling of audio tracks / addition of audio looper, no wavetable synthesis, no MPE, and nothing of the kind... lifestyle improvements only, making what is already there easier to see, easier to understand, easier to control.

    I get it -- that's not as much fun to program, it's not as much fun (or as easy) to market, it might even feel like the release "didn't really do anything". I don't even know what changes should actually make it into that release. But I bet people would end up WAY happier actually using the Deluge. In a way that "just take a chill pill" isn't going to accomplish.

    This. Absolutely this!

    Also, I pretty much agree with everything you've said in this topic. Will have a proper read and comment but just want to pick up on your attempt to distinguish between a 'bug fix' and what in the past I've called 'feature fix'. I think this is the critical point for me. I have TONS of ideas of what could be added to the Deluge to, IMHO, make it better. But I'm not so vocal about a lot of them because it's important to balance what your personal requirements are against all other users (and the development team). However that's not what you (and I) are talking about and I think there's a little disengenuity from Ian here trying to lump 'bug fixes' and 'existing feature fixes' and 'suggestions' in the same pot.

    Let me use a car analogy. Bear with me 😆

    Say you bought a new car:

    If it sets itself on fire when you start it: bug fix.
    If it has a radio but it will only tune to Russian stations and only plays at 10% volume: feature fix.
    If it has a 1.0L engine and you want a 3.0L engine: feature request.
    If it goes in the garage for new tyres and comes out with a sun roof and the old tyres still on: you sent it to Synthstrom Garage (joking!)