It would be nice for colorblind people to be able to customize the color of the synth pads on the Play+.
What is the problem?
1 in 12 men are colorblind, while 1 in 200 women have the condition. I just received my Play+, I love the new synths, but I spent 5 minutes wondering why I couldn’t select the Synth 1 pads I had laid out on the grid. As it turns out, I can’t tell the difference between the two because the Synth 1 pads are violet and selected pads are blue – the shades are too close for me to distinguish.
I can only speak about my own experience, though other colorblind people out there could chime in.
What do you want to achieve?
Be able to distinguish between selected and non-selected Synth1 pads.
There are many types of colorblindness, so changing the color of Synth 1 for everybody would possibly bother other colorblind people, and violet is as good a choice as any for non-colorblind people anyway.
What would be great to see, in the Settings, is a way to assign one of the available colors to Synth 1 (currently Violet), Synth 2 (Yellow), or Synth 3 (Green). The menu would just offer to switch from Violet to another one of the predefined colors.
I realize there is probably a limited number of colors available, but at this point I would just remap Synth 1 to the same color as Synth 2 or Synth 3 if that’s my only option; it’s more important to me to be able to select the pads rather than to distinguish between the synths, since I can always segregate a synth to its own track and not mix synths on the same track.
UPDATE: now that I have looked at the Performance page again (pictured below):
- It seems that Pink (the Loop column) is not used for pads, right? That would make for a nice replacement – for my type of colorblindness, that is.
- It looks like Synth 3 is the same color as the Repeat column, which is said to be Cyan in the Perform page documentation, even though it’s said to be Green in the pad colors documentation – so maybe they are different colors after all.
- The color of the Rearrange column does not seem to be used for pads either – the one that to me looks like actual green, but don’t take my word for it
Are there any workarounds?
Not that I know of.
Any links to related discussions?
Any references to other products?
Update: the Polyend Synth, released 6 months after this request was created, had the same issue but firmware v1.3.0 now allows users to customize the colors of its synth engines. Let’s give the same love to the Play+ please.
Nope but here is the color reference card, from the manual