the thought occurred to me that it would be really cool to be able to patch in kaivo or aalto without the mouse, or at least using it less.
what if each patch source and destination was represented by a key on a qwerty keyboard?
so to patch the vel to cutoff, you might hold the 'Q' key and then tap the 'M' key to make the connection. repeat the key combination to unpatch. hold a source key and tap multiple destination keys to route a source to many destinations simultaneously.
if an attenuator is present on the destination, allow the up/down arrows to set the attenuator. focus stays on the last patched cable allowing for up/down attenuator twiddling.
users could toggle a head up display of keys in the GUI against the source/destination patch points.
i'd buy that update for a dollar.
:)
Thanks for the idea. I'm thinking about ways to automate patching in v.2.
It would be cool if the input data was able to be given by midi, then it would be easy to whip up a max patch for those of us with an Arc that would allow control over the patching. Thinking maybe, Knob 1/2 would control the "focus" of the top and bottom destinations respectively, and then knob 3/4 would control the attenuator thats focused.
of course that would leave out a way to created / delete a patch chord. Just a thought though!
Hmm, maybe thinking about the arc or other particular controllers will be a useful way of getting at this problem.
i'm way into using grid matrix systems synthi style. well, what i imagine it was like. because expensive. :)
i got a MIDI grid system thingy setup for aalto in max that made connections, which was the easy part, but i never figured out how to automate the copy/pasting to and from aalto, so there wasn't really a point*. ;)
the issue with aalto/kaivo would be the paging system and organization of the destinations, i think. when i set it up i had 3 pages, 1 for the top row, 1 for the oscillator, gate, delay sections and 1 for the filter and reverb.
of the 14 sources i put the red 7 at the bottom because i thought it felt better for whatever reason. i also tried sequencer at the top, red in the middle and the rest at the bottom which felt pretty good too. i never tried sources at the top and destination on the side for whatever reason.
an onscreen grid where you could adjust the order of the sources and destinations and see a marker denoting a connection could be helpful, but really the GUI as it is now serves perfectly well to clue you in on what's up. in a few ways better because while a grid is very easy to physically remember it can hard to visually parse, especially on screen where it all kinds of runs together.
also, the colored LEDs on most button matrices could give an indication of the connection type, but that's getting more complex. personally, i find when you get physical with it, it becomes easy to remember the order of the connections.
i'm not sure why matrix patching in software hasn't taken off more considering button matrices are so cheap nowadays, you don't have to worry about physical contacts getting dirty or losing pins and there are no mults or stackable to worry about like with my hardware modular! :) they are great for performance. being able to make and break multiple connections at once is totally rad.
- if you could "lock" parameter values you could just use program changes to switch between all permutations of connections that have been pre calculated.
Thanks for the ideas. I'll think about how Aalto would work with a monome. I really should get one. A patching controller with an attenuverter dial controller on each output would be great!