Keyzone Ideas

Ideas & suggestions
1

Couple of fine-tuning ideas for the Keyzone area. Maybe still a little too major for a Beta suggestion but thought I’d throw them out there…

  • Distribute button should have a drop-down selection for Min and Max keyboard value.
    Obvious really. Very few non-electronic instruments (piano being one obvious exception) can play anything even close to the full ten octave range. Therefore distributing across the whole range may often not be desirable.

  • Two Copy options in the context menu for when one or more (must work with multiple) Keyzones are selected. Copy Keyzones (Complete) and Copy Keyzone Properties.
    Complete copy will also copy sample data, so if you paste into another instrument you will append these samples on the end of that instrument’s list. Making it easy to create multi-layers and split keyboard assembles from multiple different already existing instrument.
    Properties copy will only copy the properties. Related sample, note range, velocity rang etc. Say you have a bunch of instruments, each recorded across a few octave at the same spacing, each with three different velocities (for example,) maybe even with note-of layers recorded. Set one of them up completely then all you need to do is load all samples into the others and copy and paste the Keyzone Properties from the completed one.

  • Possibly… Distribute button to work with Selected Samples, rather than all in the Instrument. If only one is selected (as you can never have none selected) then it works with all of them as currently. Easy to change a single sample with the existing boxes so no need to use Distribute for that. (Unsure of this one.)

2

am working on building instruments now and i very much agree with these suggestions. i also have a question for another thing:

is it possible to have Renoise read the names of your samples and use them to determine the mapping? i have a bunch of directories with samples called A0, C3, F#5 etc etc. i now import them and arrange them manually, putting them in their right spots and changing the basenote. i think the basenote-thing already works as long as you put your first sample(s) in the right place, but not sure.

a workaround which i think also doesn’t exist would be to allow for empty keyzones. that way, when i create 1 instrument, i can just re-use the keyzones and replace the samples with those of a 2nd instrument.

is there a tool for this or do i have to start scripting? :)

3

I would agree on setting the min and max notes for the sample distribution, generate drumkit thing works way better than the distribute option because it allows to select the start note.

Also I noticed that when one moves a keyzone up or down the octave, the base note does not move along with it. Is that the intended behaviour?