Hey Ben--
Remember we were talking about keyboard shortcuts a while back. I do
actually have a reason for wanting a particular setup, and I'm curious
if others would find this useful as well.
Right now, with DB's current programming, the best way (imho) to set up
the keyboard shortcuts is to have ALL of the same "drum type" under one
key, and just cycle through them by hitting that same key multiple
times until you get the one you want. This works great for many
reasons, one being the limited number of keys you need to remember to
be able to access every drum in the kit.
The drawback(s) to that, though: you can't "play" that same drum more
than once with the key-- because the next time you hit it, it cycles to
the next variant. And unless you give each drum its own distinct "drum
type" name, you can't play one drum type on one key and then its
variant on another key in succession. (Remember the example I gave, in
vol. 20, #5 of the digest.) AND if you have a lot of variants for that
one drum and you go past it, you have to cycle all the way through all
the other variants to get back around to it. AND you can't go straight
back to a variant after choosing a different drum type-- the next time
you hit that key for that drum, it goes to the default variant, or the
top one in the list if no default has been chosen.
I've found that actually "playing" the kit from the keyboard is not
only fun, but useful. Sometimes my fingers stumble across a groove that
I otherwise wouldn't have written (just like on any instrument--
writing FOR it and writing ON it are often very different processes).
Then I just try to write down what I played. And, if I have someone
else in the room looking for a particular beat, rather than having to
write out the beat and hit play every time I adjust it, before I
actually write any of it down I can "play" the beat for them live, by
using the keyboard shortcuts. Maybe I'm just being silly about it, but
I like the ability to play my Mac keyboard as a drum machine, and I
think it broadens DB's usefulness to have that ability.
It seems like it would be possible to change the KB shortcut
assignments section of the code to accommodate this... any chance you
could put this on the wish list?
Thanks,
Dan