Notes setup
Notes setup can be used to configure the active track’s pad layout, the global musical scale, and more.
##Scale
The program stores one musical scale that is used wherever notes are entered. Notes played in notes mode, or entered into the sequencer, are constrained to the scale. There is only one global scale, and all tracks use the same one. This is primarily for convenience’s sake, since you’ll typically only use one scale, and it would be tedious to enter into all 8 tracks individually. To configure the scale, a 1 octave piano keyboard is drawn at the bottom of the grid, and by pressing the keys, you can enable or disable that note for the scale. The bottom left most key (C by default) is the root note of the scale, so it cannot be turned off.
Note that the keyboard reflects the current transpose setting, so if you have hit transpose up 4 times it will be drawn starting from E. Transposing does not, however, change the scale, it only transposes it. Say you start from the default root note of C, and press the C# key to disable it. You are not disabling the note C#, you are disabling the note 1 half step above the root note. If you then transpose one half step up, C# will be the root note (and thus enabled) and D will be one half step above the root note (and thus disabled).
##Layout
Above the keyboard is the row offset slider, which can be used to set the distance between rows on the grid. It accepts values from 1 to 8, in units of scale steps. By default it is set to 5 steps of the chromatic scale, which corresponds to fourths tuning like you’d find on a guitar or bass. If you were to enter a major scale, for instance, then a row offset of 8 would mean each pad was a whole octave above the pad below it, and a value of 1 would mean each pad was only one step of the scale higher than the one below.
Continuing up past the row offset slider, there are some checkboxes. The leftmost one enables full velocity mode. With full velocity enabled all notes with be played at full volume.
All the way to the right are the drum layout checkboxes. The bottom one enables the drum layout, which does away with the scale and row offset, and will instead split this track's layout into 4 4x4 drum pad grids, which are laid out chromatically from bottom to top, with each quadrant offset one octave from the one before it. The top row of one quadrant overlaps with the first row of the next one.
Above the drum layout checkbox is the multichannel checkbox. With this enabled, each note will be sent on its own MIDI channel, which is calculated by offsetting the track’s configured channel by the note index (C is 0, C# is 1, etc). If you’ve configured track 1 to send on midi channel 3, and enabled multichannel, then C (regardless of what octave) will send on channel 3, D would play on channel 5, and so on. Quick note on this feature: I put it in because I have a Korg Volca Sample, which dedicates a single channel to each voice, and I didn’t want to have to dedicate multiple sequences to just one instrument. I don’t know how common it is for other hardware to do this, but if you have a piece of hardware that would benefit from a similar feature, or a change to the behavior of this feature, let me know.
Each track keeps track of its own individual row offset, transpose, drum, and multichannel settings. Say you had one track playing a bass line, and another playing a lead, you could have different octave settings on each track and when you switched between them in notes mode, the pads will be at the correct range. You could set another track to be in drum layout mode, and it will switch back to the drum layout whenever you selected that track.
##Aftertouch/Control Codes
At the top of the grid, there is a group of controls related to the track’s handling of aftertouch. In the top left is a checkbox to enable/disable aftertouch. When it is on, any notes played in notes mode will send polyphonic aftertouch, and the highest currently held aftertouch value will also be sent as a midi control change.
The control code number widget is used to select which control code to send. See number widgets for tips on entering this value.
Below that is a slider determining the sensitivity of the aftertouch. At its maximum value, the control codes will span the full 0-127 range, but at lower values, the CC will be scaled down (to about 1/5th at the minimum). By holding shift while you use this slider, you can make the control scale negatively: the harder you press, the smaller the value will be.
Next is the CC offset, which is a value added to the aftertouch value after it is scaled by the sensitivity. This is basically the default value the control will be at, and the harder you press, the further from this point you get (either above or below depending on your selected scaling). This slider sends the selected CC when you change it, which is useful for testing that you entered the correct number, and for use with MIDI learn functions on software instruments.
##Pitch wheel
Lastly, the two checkboxes we skipped over before, in between the full velocity and the drum layout checkboxes, are the mod wheel checkboxes, which are more closely related to aftertouch. On the bottom is the pitch wheel enable checkbox. With this on, a widget will be drawn in the top left corner of your notes mode layout that mimics a traditional pitch bend wheel on a midi keyboard.
The "wheel" reacts to aftertouch, with the top half representing the positive range, and the bottom the negative. The inner two pads, in green, give fine control that covers half the pitch bend range, and the outer two blue pads give full control over the whole range. However, the pitch bend functionality of this is limited, as the resolution of the aftertouch on the pads is a little too coarse to get good pitch control, and pitch bend is not recorded like aftertouch, as there isn't enough ram to store both.
The real use of the little mod wheel comes with the checkbox above the pitch bend enable checkbox, which switches the functionality of the wheel to a mod wheel, and will take over the role previously described in Aftertouch/Control Codes. What this means is that the CC, sensitivity, and offset that you configured for aftertouch can instead be controlled by this mod wheel. This makes it easier to play notes without accidentally triggering the aftertouch at inopportune times, and it also allows you to record negative CC values (relative to the CC offset) as well as positive ones.