Whenever I try to learn a programming language (or application environment) I look to scratch my own itch.
Following what @joule said, think of something you do fairly often, and where a handy shortcut would be nice.
Something I’ve considered writing: Tool to go through a track-pattern (or the whole track, maybe) and adjust all velocity values by some percent.
I often improvise with a MIDI keyboard and them select stuff I want to keep, but I’ve noticed that often, despite my best efforts, the velocity is too high. I think my keyboard isn’t that sensitive, or my technique is just poor : )
I’ve wanted a way to automate correcting this, as manual editing is tedious and error-prone.
If you’re ambitious: Add an option to do some random delta of the velocity: If the user wants a 30% reduction, with a 2% variance range, then each velocity change will be some random value between 28% and 32%.
Something like this would give you a chance to do a simple(ish) GUI, save previous values, add a keyboard binding for shortcut keys, and so on.
PS I’ve a bunch of stuff here that might have code examples to steal from (as I have done from others):
lua · master · James Britt / Neurogami / renoise-ng · GitLab