Hey Dan, Could you reiterate for me what you are requesting here, if it hasn't already been implemented? :) As I read this, it sounds like you can solve the problem by simply assigning unique key shortcuts to each drum you might want to "play live". Of course, if you are requesting the ability to actually record into DB by playing live on the keyboard... I hear ya, and this is definitely on the todo list! -b Dan Costello wrote at 1:13 pm (-0700) on 22 2 2005:
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
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