Hi everyone,
Apologies for the long post. I know this is probably too much to expect one person to respond to, but I have a lot to ask.
Even though I've dabbled in openmpt for a while now, I haven't sunk very deep into it yet. I've done a few simple things, but I want to get more complex. The first reason I haven't is just lack of energy, second is that I'm having a hard time getting a good feel for tracking in general. I think part of this is that I'm a screen reader user, and despite the great efforts on Openmpt accessibility, I think tracking is always going to be a bit clunky when you're trying to do it blind.
In an effort to get some perspective, I wanted to ask how other people do things. There are three specific areas I'm curious about. Two are primarily musical, while one is related more to workflow. I'll mention the workflow first.
I often feel pretty awkward especially when working with the pattern editor. This is probably my fault; I haven't really gotten to grips with all the keyboard shortcuts yet, and I do need to sit down and assign them to my liking. Still, a few bars of music seems like it takes forever, and I rarely have the energy to go beyond the first pattern. This is probably because I go row by row in a very deliberate way when I'm editing, or I count rows and do mental math to work out where I am eg. if there are 8 rows per beat, and I'm on row 18, I know I'm somewhere in the third beat.
My impression though is that sighted users can look at an entire pattern, or at least a large chunk of it, and they can take the whole thing in at a glance. Furthermore, I imagine the row colors and misc display features help a lot in determining where beats, measures etc. are, so it's really easy to visually put things where you want them. Counting rows, and doing math to figure out where you are, is probably not an efficient strategy by comparison.
I guess my main question here is wondering if I'm right. If I am, then the difference between a blind and sighted workflow seems huge, and my next question is if that gap can be narrowed with practice and customization, or if this is just something I'm going to have to get used to. I know there's no definite answer for that, but it's something I'm trying to figure out.
Now for the musical stuff. First is drums. How do people sketch out and do drum patterns? I've seen some pretty intricate drum sequencing in modules, and I'll be honest, it's a little intimidating. I just can't imagine how people can write that stuff out!
I bet you could make things easy by just mapping samples across the keyboard in a single instrument. This would in particular make sketching easier. But if you want to apply different envelopes to each sample, that approach won't work; you'll need separate instruments. Most if not all modules I've looked at take this approach. And I'd like to as well, but sketching is going to be really hard then, unless I'm missing something?
Finally, layering. Either putting two instruments together to make a thicker sound, or using echo channels. Duplicating/Copy-pasting is easy enough, but I often find myself needing to go back and change things eg. cutting a note off a row earlier, or tweaking an effect parameter. The prospect of editing the main channel plus 1, 2 or more echo channels or layers is simply daunting for me. Is this just something to get used to, or is there a way to make this easier?
In MML I normally set up macros or the equivalent in this kind of situation. This lets me copy a melody to multiple channels easily, and every edit I want to make only has to be done once. I guess I'm just looking for that convenience.
So yeah, that's more or less everything I can think of right now. Any insight?
