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Old 11-20-2019, 04:45 AM   #64
White Tie
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Blighty
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bFooz View Post
The channel hues goes sequentially from red to red. I'd suggest to shuffle the order into 4 groups of 4 "hue families" - GBYR.
Always happy to have this conversation If everyone else gets bored while we nerd out about colours, that's their problem By the way, if you'd like to have it in a freer and less pressured context, please do have your say on my custom colour palettes, which are much more fun! The colour map does rather defy efforts to bring design to it, because any perceived 'weighting' in the colours has no reason to be expected to coincide with the musical weighting, except in velocity obviously.

We have sort-of experimented with chunking into groups before, without a great deal of success, though its hard to say how much of that comes down to users legitimate demand to 'not make anything worse in any context' in practice meaning 'just don't change anything, ever' which is how we end up with the same colourmap being used and reused for the best part of a decade.

I'd be happy to look at this again, but as I recall the main complaint was that, if we were to assume users using vaguely sequential channels more often than not (though, pffft, how legitimate is that?) then similar colours reappear with greater spacing between their contexts, increasing the risk of unrelated things being mistaken for the same thing.

My response to that, which I still personally believe is a very good point even though I'm not a heavy MIDI user, is that it is not correct to assume that all users use all the channels, and that I would expect a good majority of users to have their channels clumped down in the low numbers (assuming people start from one ...?), and so there is benefit to be found from maximising colour differentiation down there. Complicated MIDI is out of my area of expertise, and my MIDI testers tend to be people who do lots of complicated MIDI, and so I do get the vague idea that sometimes I should, to a degree, represent the needs of the casual user, which I think colour blocks would do. I am not sufficiently confident of my position on this to coming close to overruling a load of hardcore composers though!

A lot of this also fundamentally comes down to the obvious problem that a colour theorist's response to 'differentiating between 16 different things of equal weight using solely colour" would be OMG don't do that, ever. Well, we do have to do it, so ...er... heh.

Quote:
Originally Posted by bFooz View Post
(Notice the hue is not HSB based)
Can you explain what you mean by that please?

Quote:
Originally Posted by bFooz View Post
There is also color by voice, which now uses 0,90,180 hues. This could be also spread around the circle (3 voices exist - default, top, bottom).
Voice assigns its colours from the pitch colours, and is hardwired. That's not to say the pitch colours wouldn't benefit from some attention, of course I have been expressly asked not to change the 'C=Red' starting point that people have become used to, which doesn't mean I can't, it just means if I do I would need a very good reason. If you can provide such a reason, I'd gladly put it into the conversation.
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