In full respect that my question may be difficult (if not impossible) to answer, nevertheless I have always wondered:
Was there originally (or is there now) any rhyme or reason to the placement of articulation key mappings?
I’m asking because I’m on the point of re-mapping a ton of stuff strictly for my own visual convenience, (but… maybe I don’t wanna do that…??) So, out of both long-standing curiosity and an abundance of caution before I do a ton of work, I submit this topic.
As many of the mappings might be holdovers going back as far perhaps as 2 (and as Drew is no longer here to offer institutional memory… shoutout, Drew!) I have often wondered why related articulations are sometimes not mapped next to each other, and occasionally not even close.
Hi-hats come to mind mostly – partly because they have the most articulations to map I guess.
But extending as well to drums or cymbals… wouldn’t even their “Choke” articulations belong alongside the others in their kit piece family?
I suppose one response to that could be, do you want an articulation you’d almost never use, or might not even be commonly found across the majority of kit pieces, hogging up visual real estate right along with all the usual ones.
But other than that, I can’t think of why the mappings occasionally appear to be kind of… arbitrary.
I use both Digital Performer and Live (although the re-mapping effort I mentioned concerns Ableton Live specifically).
Unlike Live, DP’s Drum Editor can group pitches visually even if they’re not consecutive on the keyboard. Indeed you want to do this with hi-hats, for example, when you’re looking to assign note-exclusivity.
So re-mapping just for spread-outness isn’t all that necessary in DP (at least in the Drum Editor – although in the Sequence Editor… yeeesh).
But in Ableton Live, you can’t visually move pitches around – the piano roll is what it is. You can of course create priority groups within the individual chains so that multiple articulations won’t sound simultaneously if you don’t want them to.
But you will have to do a bit of scrolling to “find the strays” if you’re making any effort to vary up the articulations a bit when you’re polishing a pattern.
And – although my mind reels at thought – of course this always then inflames the question of what a re-mapping will do to external trigger pad assignments. (Answer: Nothing Good.)
I guess it’s worth putting the time in to a “One Mapping To Rule Them All” effort, which would apply consistently across different DAWs and my triggers as well. But… oh. The pain… the pain….