On 13.01.25 09:33, Kristian Amlie wrote:
But I have one "side question": Does you suggestion relate at all to crossfades between kit items? We had a discussion there a while back about how the cross fades are happening by fading velocity up and down for the two crossfaded parts, but it should really be fading the volume. I've been meaning to look at fixing this, but it's not entirely trivial and I got a bit side tracked from that project.
Yes indeed, this is spot on. To recall the whole story why I'd like to engage into this project: I am looking for ways to help with "fine-tuning and voicing" of a patch or instrument, in a similar way how you'd do that for a physical instrument. An organ stop is a good example. If you'd just build an array of pipes, these would not work well together in a musical way. If you'd hit a chord, the individual tones would not sound balanced. And if you'd be playing some arpeggio or runs, it would not "run well". These are the very problems we often encounter with synth sounds. You create an interesting spectrum, but then you'll notice that it does not work well in a score. Sometimes you'd get a much to drastic change of tone within a single octave. Anyway, we all know these kind of problems, and we've found ways to work around them. Which, however, often tend to be limiting in other ways, and at the very least are often quite labour intensive. A cross fade based on volume, not velocity, would be indeed just another tool in the toolbox, that could be used to handle such a "tuning and voicing". Another solution would be to introduce a new, single top-level control, which allows to make an automatic adjustment of the note volume based on the MIDI note. At this point for me the most relevant question is "how far can and should we go with implementing such a new feature"? * if we are overly timid, we create yet-another-not-so-useful special feature * if we approach it in a excessively broad way, we might degrade performance, or create a maintenance problem in the code base, and the feature might be too abstract to grasp, at least for people without technical background. That is the reason why I'm proposing to handle this as a "project", progressing in several steps. bottom-ip. And then, the secondary issue with a per-key aftertouch was just the final idea that also hinted into a similar direction. Thus I want to start out from a very abstract notion, which is that of a "cross linking" between control channels. And my proposal was to first find out about the reality in the code base, to look into possible issues and to conduct a thorough performance investigation. If that goes well, we'd create a base platform for several new features. And we could then hopefully take the time to discuss how to actually provide those features, and to what degree. And yes, a cross fade based on volume would just be a special case, that could be implemented on top of that base feature. Because this base feature would foremost require to transport a small record of per-note-settings to some parts of the engine, which right now are invoked as simple functions. So basically my idea is to have a point-of-application for such an adjustment in each base engine instance. If this goes well, the actual implementation handling of kit crossfades would move down to this application point, while from a user's POV the feature remains the same (maybe with an additional option "by volume"). I'd like to add that this proposal was much inspired by the colour curves in GIMP. You can see the same principle there. GIMP provides a tool for advanced users, which allows to tweak each colour curve. But it also provides the simple settings "brightness / contrast" and it provides an intermediary level of settings, known as the "levels" (shadow, mid-tones, lights). But from each of those, you can hit "edit as curves" and then continue with the advanced control and fine-tune the settings. -- Hermann _______________________________________________ Yoshimi-devel mailing list Yoshimi-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/yoshimi-devel
