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muleskinner

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muleskinner
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  • Loop Screen / Cycle Region

    Unless I'm missing something - If you're editing a long pattern and want to work on the final bar there seems to be no way of doing this without listening to the entire sequence over and over. This gets pretty tedious, if not unworkable, when working on 8 bar patterns and over.

    The Tempest has a toggle function 'loop screen' which just loops the currently visible area. I I think something like this is really needed on the Deluge - particularly as it can deal with such long track lengths.

    ==== EDIT: Here are some ideas as to how cool this could be in the 2.0 arranger...

    -Have a new type of track in the arranger view, a 'cycle track'
    -Users can create as many of these tracks as they want
    -Enter regions on a 'cycle track' just as you'd enter notes on a normal track
    -Regions are coloured automatically so you don't get two adjacent regions of the same colour (user can probably override this)
    -Shift click on a region and it goes white (active). Only one region may be active at one time.
    -When a region is active 'play' always starts from the start of that region and the arranger loops within that region
    -If the active region is changed whilst playing, playback jumps when the playhead reaches the end of the current region

    A more detailed and illustrated description of how this might work is here.

    Something akin to the above would both be really, really helpful in terms of arranging songs but also really useful for performance as it would allow the user to set up 'scenes' with different mute states etc and jump between them, similar to how switching between song sections works now, but much more flexible and with no limit to the amount of sections.

    It also means you could set up one section of the arranger for a 'scratch pad' of ideas and have another for the 'finished' song, that type of thing. It would actually be miles more flexible than the way cycling works in many DAWs!

  • Transmit MIDI Pitch Bend and Aftertouch

    Title says it all really - the ability to sequence pitch bend and channel pressure/aftertouch as we can with other CCs.

    I can't be the only one who uses pitch bend a hell of a lot. Pitch bend and aftertouch are also 'hard wired' to key functionality on certain hardware (e.g. Sherman FIlterbank) and are often supported on devices that only support a narrow range of MIDI control parameters (e.g. DSI Tempest).

    If there's a problem storing the higher bit depth values per step then I don't really see an issue with having 'bit reduced' versions - at least we can then use them!

    Personally I don't see a pressing need for polyphonic aftertouch but others may disagree.

  • MIDI Kits(?)

    I would like the ability to create a 'kit' from custom MIDI notes so that I can easily switch to control external gear/software. Stuff like Superior Drummer, DSI Tempest etc that have fairly esoteric MIDI mappings (though vaguely based on the GM drum mappings).

    In an ideal world what I'd like to do it sketch out ideas using the Deluge's sampler and then just switch that pattern to a kit that I've set up to control my Tempest, Superior Drummer, BFD, Geist or whatever.

    I guess it's just like a user scale really only with different notes in each octave!

  • Colours In The Arranger (and on the Deluge in General)

    I'm starting this as a general discussion of how colours are used on the Deluge, but particularly how they are used on the new arranger. I wanted to start a discussion that isn't necessarily tied to one particular feature request. Sorry - it's rather long but I wanted to get this down and never really feel all the angles get covered in short facebook comments.

    There seem to be a number of people (myself included) who find the colouring by section type on the new arranger somewhat confusing as it can be very hard to tell what instrument each lane refers to. There needs to be a solution to this, though it's not immediately obvious what this might be and what works for one person's workflow may not work for others.

    In a nutshell I think the problem boils down to this - any musical scoring UI (which is what the Deluges arranger is) has two basic components - a timeline and a bunch of instruments. This is the case whether you are composing in a DAW or looking at a traditional orchestral score. You need two dimensions to visualise this, like an x,y graph. All DAWS I've ever come across do this by tracks labelled by instrument vertically and some kind of timeline at the top running horizontally. Orchestral scores work roughly in the same way with.

    On the Deluge we currently only have one 'dimension' of labelling, that of colour. This means you are stuck between a rock and a hard place as you can only label by timeline (section type in the Deluge's case) or part colour.

    If you arrange by section type you end up with something similar to the image below for a typical verse / chorus / verse / chorus / break type arrangement.

    This has the following advantages..

    • It's extremely clear to see where the different sections are in the arrangement
    • It's arguably clearer when placing tracks into the arrangement as these tend to be different per section

    ...and the following disadvantages

    • It's impossible to tell what instrument each lane refers to
    • It's inconsistent because parts appear differently in the arranger than they do in section view

    We do have certain tools for 'auditioning' each lane but you are always working partly in the dark and, unless you have a very good memory, are constantly clicking the 'audition' butting to remind yourself which lane refers to which instrument. It's particularly problematic on instruments that you can't hear when auditioning which include those allocated to MIDI CCs only, kits that only consist of GATE outputs, or external hardware like drum machines that might not respond to a C3 note.

    The other option would be to organise the arranger by part colour, ie the colour the user has allocated to a particular part in section view. In that case the arranger would end up looking something like the image below for the same arrangement (assuming the user has coloured their parts by instrument type which I'm presuming most people do)

    This has the following advantages..

    • It's extremely clear to see which lane refers to which instrument
    • It's consistent - parts look the same in the arranger as they do in section view

    ...and the following disadvantages

    • It's extremely hard (if not impossible) to tell which section is which
    • It's arguably less clear when placing parts into the arrangement as you can't differentiate them by section

    So - neither scenario really 'wins'. Both are problematic and the 'best' solution really depends on user preference and workflow.

    Continued in next post...

  • What do you think about Deluge Effects?

    I see PSP have broken down their superb DSP code into 'module' sized chunks. And they're happy to move out of the usual VST/AU space. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have effects of this quality in the Deluge?

    http://www.pspaudioware.com/voltage/

    Trying to develop industry standard DSP whilst also creating a killer synth and sequencer is more than a mere mortal can cope with IMO. People have spent decades on this stuff - why not use what's already out there?

    ;)

  • Just plain, simple Audio Thru please!

    Agreed - I think we need more sampling options generally, threshold based and also the ability to record loops from external hardware without going through the workaround of setting up a drone note etc etc. Ideally the option to audition/discard multiple 'takes' of the same loop though this might be pushing it UI-wise on the Deluge.

    I know there are other FRs for these but they all fit in the same 'group' to my mind. I always liked FXPansion Geist for sampling, its options just seemed right to me and the whole process very intuitive. It was much better than Maschine.

  • Undo Command

    The more I play with this thing the more I'm convinced 'undo record' is essential.

    The way it works on the Tempest is nice. 'Undo Record' deletes everything recorded since 'record' was last pressed, so if you record something that you know is a keeper you just toggle 'record' off and on again and you know it's not going to get 'undone'. I find it a very intuitive way to work, though I still manage to screw it up sometimes!

  • Beta 2.1 - Setting 'Loop Points' to zero crossing to avoid clicks

    It definitely needs something, I'm finding it pretty much impossible to get click-free loops at the moment. Needs some kind of automatic snap to zero and/or a very short crossfade at the loop point. The waveform display is great for 'broad brush' editing but too lo-fi for really precise stuff - it's impossible to tell exactly where zero is!

    Update is awesome overall though.

  • Midi tracks in Kits

    I agree - there's already a request for this called 'midi kits' or something, it was one of the first requests I set up. I wasn't thinking of mixing 'midi' and 'normal' kits but that's a good idea.
  • Colours In The Arranger (and on the Deluge in General)

    Hi Rohan,

    Thanks for your input here, I know how busy you must be on 2.0!

    I was aware of the 'tail' on the arranger view and I guess my mockups are a bit misleading because they don't represent that. In practice though I find that the tail colour always goes pretty 'mushy' on the arranger page and consequently it's not very useful in determining which lane belongs to which instrument. I don't know if that's because it's (possibly) merging the colours somehow when you're zoomed out (I usually seem to be working at more of a macro level in the arranger), because there tends to be a lot of white in there, or because they are reduced in brightness.

    If we had a single colour per instrument, rather than the multi-coloured tracks, it could potentially be a lot easier to read the tail colour on the arranger page and this could make it much clearer which lane belongs to which instrument.

    I just realised yesterday that the above is far from an original idea on my part and there is already a well-supported feature request for it here.