What is the problem?
Currently it’s assumed that all samples are tuned to C. The vast majority of third party sample packs have many tonal samples tuned to notes other than C. It’s practically impossible to use tonal samples of other pitches.
Firsty, the user sees wrong info when working with the Note knob. It says C but can be anything. The same with the view keyboard. The user has to bear that in mind when entering notes and also they have to constantly do mental transposition.
Secondly, the scale and scale filter features are not compatible with such samples. Imagine, a sample called ‘Cool piano sound D#3.wav’ was loaded into the sample memory. Root note is C, scale is Major, scale filter on. D# is outside of the scale, but as the Play ‘thinks’ it’s C, the scale filter would not repitch the sample to the nearest-in-scale note and it’ll play D#.
The user could load only samples tuned to notes belonging to the scale, i.e. ‘Cool piano sound E.wav’. But if some pitch-changing algorithms and effects are applied to the sample (melodic fills/note randomization/random note chance/note repeats/performing with red pads in perform mode), it’ll still produce ‘wrong’ notes. The global scale itself is subject to change during live performance too.
All that has been said forces the user to either to not use such samples at all or to give up on using the scale feature which is a severe limitation.
What should this feature achieve?
Ability to use any tonal sample with the scale related features the Play provides.
Ideally, the Play would detect pitch info from the sample name when importing a sample into the sample pool but there should be at least a way to specify base pitch manually.
Are there any workarounds?
Time consuming mental transposition, avoiding scales, laborious editing of samples outside of the machine.
Any links to related discussions?
Any references to other products?
In the Tracker it’s possible to change base pitch of a sample-based instrument.
