Use Case:
When recording each track with live recording for a percussion performance, a natural sounding performance isn’t only accomplished via humanizing features like microtiming, but also timbre variation the harder a percussion instrument is hit. This can be accomplished via multisampling, leveraging a strategy similar to how the Slice mode is implemented. The idea is to have a sample composed of separate hits of a percussion instrument that represent the change in volume and timbre as velocity increases, going from left to right in the sample. (Percussion is the focus, but can have other uses.)
The expected result is that the played slice position within the sample is chosen based on the velocity. This feature is intended to work with MIDI input as well. For example, if you hit a keyboard MIDI controller key harder, it automatically plays the appropriate sample slice due to the change in velocity. This behavior is more natural than having to hit separate keys/notes in order to change slices, especially from the perspective of how percussion intuitively works. (This could also be the foundation of an instrument kit feature for future work, mentioned below.)
User Interface:
For the user interface, this is similar to the existing Slice mode, except when choosing each slice position, you also set the velocity percentage threshold. If the effect velocity is greater than or equal to the given slice position (and less than the next slice position velocity), then the given slice of the sample is played for the note. If no velocity is input or set for a note, then consider it 100% velocity. Notes control pitch, i.e. choosing different notes than middle C will pitch the sample slice.
Of course, the very beginning and ending of the overall sample are relevant. For the very beginning of the sample, it plays as a slice when velocity is above zero but less than the velocity of the first explicitly positioned slice. For the last slice position that plays until the end of the sample, it must have a greater velocity percentage set than prior slice positions, and the maximum velocity it can have is 100%. In that case, the last slice is played only when velocity is 100%. It can be set lower, as long as it is greater than the previous positions. So velocity for slice positions always increase going from left to right.
Limitations and Future Work:
This strategy won’t handle multisampling of something like an entire percussion kit, as it effectively uses slices to only represent a single instrument whose sound changes as velocity increases. (Musicians are free to use this feature for other purposes that aren’t percussion, of course.) But if it is desired in the future to support having an entire multisampled kit (such as a drum kit which must support multiple multisampled instruments), then the idea would be to add a kit feature where the kit defines which of these “multisampled one-shot” instruments are associated with the kit and assigned to specific pads. This would be most useful as a percussion kit. The reason is because a kit would limit note pitch variation per instrument in the kit, because at most a multisampled instrument could only be assigned to a subsection of pads. Therefore, for a (potentially future) kit feature, pitch support would be optional to implement.
