The sequencing idea is a great one. There was an early Mac drum program called Different Drummer which unfortunately only supported 8 bit sounds, but had a nice graphical implementation of songs where you could nest loops on individual sections or sequences of sections. It was a very flexible and concise way to represent song structure (IMHO). -- Lee On 2/10/03 3:48 PM, "Eric Bailey" <ebailey@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
These are all very cool ideas that I would love to see implemented.
Additionally, I think there is a great opportunity for enhancing the sequencing abilities of Doggiebox. The interface focus could change, making the process of creating drum parts much easier.
Basically, you'd base the entire editing interface on a song section (to use the terminology from the Doggiebox section marker list). Edits are made one section at a time, and all sections still appear in the section list.
The interface twist is that, instead of piecing together a song in the editor window, you do it in a "song-map" window that's basically a table of the drum sections in the order you want them to be played back and, for each section, how many bars should be played, what the starting bar is, etc.
A song could then be put together by dragging sections from the section list into the song-map. A song could quickly change by reordering the song-map list, changing any song-map section's playback parameters, or adding/deleting sections from the song-map.
An example song might be comprised of the following sections, all 4 bars each: Intro, Verse, Chorus, Chorus2, and Interlude. Quickly arranging those sections into a song could result in something that looks like: Intro, Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Chorus2, Interlude, Chorus, Chorus2.
Maybe you want the last Chorus2 to repeat - just double the number of bars it plays for.
Maybe something's missing in the change from Chorus to Chorus2 - create a new section called ChorusTransition that's 1 bar long, put it in between the Chorus/Chorus2 sections, and have the related Chorus play only 3 instead of 4 bars.
Maybe the first bar of the Chorus after the Interlude needs more symbols - create a new section called InterludeTransition, 1 bar long, place it after the Interlude, have that post-Interlude Chorus start on bar 2 and now play only 2 bars (since we also use ChorusTransition).
At least for me, putting together and editing a song in this fashion would be a lot simpler than having a long editing window full of similar looking bars encompassing the entire song. Of course, there's no reason why the two forms of editing can't coexist simultaneously, having a switch for the editor to go between section and full song mode.
Lets go back to that InterludeTransition. Say we just directly edit that first bar of Chorus after the Interlude. The software could automatically set up a new section called Fill1, insert Fill1 between the Interlude and Chorus in the song-map, and change that Chorus' starting bar to 2. Later, you could rename Fill1 to InterludeTransition.
I'm interested in hearing other users' feedback on this. I was going to write a program based around this concept in the middle of last year but got sidetracked (aka married) and saw the first release of Doggiebox and wanted to see how it would develop.
(Ben - I had this interface pretty fully spec'd out at one point. If you're interested in specifics, I'd be happy to go over them with you. Additionally, I'd be happy to help in coding some of this functionality if you wanted to focus on some of the other great features requested in this thread.)
Thanks all, Eric