Key Groups

Right ive never worked with keygroups before, im mainly someone who would use real instruments. I've been reading the os 2 manual and for the life of me i cant get my head around constructing one! is there anyone that could give me an in depth process of how to create one? sorr for the silly question!

does OS 2 allow you to create keygroups or just simply load them?

diegoeskryptic wrote:does OS 2 allow you to create keygroups or just simply load them?

You can load them or create your own.

I think he is asking, how do you go about making one

Yeah i have no idea of how too create one, the manual assumes ive worked with keygroups before, which i havent anyone with a brief explanation!

I think you should first understand what an actual keygroup program is. There are several threads in the forum about them that you can read up on.

You should also Google "The Lost Art of Sampling". There are 7 parts to this article. You will gain a good understand of sampling.

For a more hands on approach..download the free piano keygroup programs at Akai's website and look at how the program in constructed.

Basics:
1. Program Mode
2. Create Program -->keygroup
3. Assign sample to keygroup program
4. You can now play the sample across a full range of keys (when a MIDI keyboard controller is connected)

yeah i got most of that man but i for some reason seemed to think that i could use 4 samples of different nots to make a more acurate sound, is this correct?

Don Blake wrote:yeah i got most of that man but i for some reason seemed to think that i could use 4 samples of different nots to make a more acurate sound, is this correct?

You're getting in the right direction!

Keygroup means, a sample depends to a specified range of keys and it is tuned chromatically (or has it's own specified or fixed tuning) in this range of keys.

The basic use of keygroups is, you can record a sample of an instrument and put it into a range of keys, and then take another sample of this (or another) instrument, and put it to a following range of keys. So the overall sound sounds much better than you would play one single sample over all keys.

For best results, a keygroup can be done on every single note (the term "group" seems a bit misleading then). This means every note has its own sample (and every layer on this note could have up to 4 different samples for velocity expressions). If you don't want to invest so much work, you can choose other keygroup ranges, maybe octaves, then you can have after every octave another sampled sound... however where you want to put the samples...

In addition to the 4 sample layers per keygroup...you can also layer keygroups by assigning them to the same note range. So yu can actually create a program with numerous velocity layers. I tried to create a keygroup program with 8 velocity layers...but gave up because it was too much work. I wish there was a page added which list all the keygroups and their keyranges, pan, etc. so I can go down the list and quickly change parameters. The MPC 4000 has such a screen.

the 4 "layers" do not have independent adsr, pitch, filter, effects, etc.....correct?

LvngDead wrote:the 4 "layers" do not have independent adsr, pitch, filter, effects, etc.....correct?

No they don't which is among the functions that are at the top of my feature request list. The work around would be to stack 4 keygroups on top of eachother....with 128 keygroups per program, there are plenty to accomplish this.