This “play_a_note” thing was starting to show other benefits too. I realised it wouldn’t be hard to add a completely other way of playing a note(pad/slice/sound).
{Aside: Really its getting out of hand, what should I be calling this “bit of a loop” Slice? Pad? Sound? Beat? OK for this episode I will settle on “Pad” – Aside over.}
I could re-pitch a selected pad across the whole keyboard. Instead of assigning 32 different pads to 32 keyboard keys I would assign a single pad across all the keyboard and retune the sound it made to match the pressed key. This might not be such a great deal for drum sounds (Slice’s bread and butter loops) but for already pitched loops, like bass loops or evolving sounds etc. You would get a whole new mode of playing parts of the loop.
In the end 2 octaves either side of the original pad sound was about the limit of usefulness so I implemented it. Deciding how to show this in the interface was a bit problematic, until again I gave up on my original approach to the interface and adapted to circumstance. I added a whole new tab so you could be in pattern mode or pitched mode. To get to pitched mode you simply press the PITCHED tab, select a pad; that identifies the sound(loop start point) you want to play with, define a middle note, which when pressed plays the original pad sound, and then you start playing the two octaves above or below your defined middle note. Simple really. Sure its not Abelton Live or anything, sounds speed up and slow down as you move across the keyboard, but even this “old-school” pitched sound is pretty interesting. Chords made up of re-pitched snare sounds anyone?
Below are some loops played using this pitched mode.
Whilst I’m here it might be worth talking about the “other” mode available in Slice. It’s got no name, but you could call it “not pattern and not pitched” mode, but I tend to mentally refer to it as “Stopped Mode”. If you have the PATTERN tab selected, but you are NOT playing a pattern (so STOPPED right?), then when you click on a pad(with your mouse) Slice works out which part of the loop you want, it moves to the start position of that “slice” and plays it – nothing special there, that’s what pattern playback does but it does it for a whole sequence of pads.
But if you press the *keyboard key* associated with a pad(instead of clicking on a pad with your mouse) then Slice works out which part of the loop you want, it moves to the start position of that “slice” and starts playing the loop from there, and here’s the important bit: and continues to play through the loop until you lift off the key. So if you press and hold the key associated with the first pad then Slice starts at the beginning of the loop and keeps playing through the loop until you lift off the key, so you can easily play through the whole loop if you want, or pick another pad and you can start your “continuous playback” from any of the 32 pad positions.
