Btw. I'll be calling the "active presets" devices or instruments, some of these shall be the new name
. Not sure, which yet 
.Before we get to that, many of your responded with fears about "limiting" the designers. So at the end most of the rules are not mandatory, but only recommended. The idea is to make a unified workflow for the end users, which is the most important thing after all. But as a consequence I'd also like to make the life of the designers easier by providing them with a template, that contains almost everything they will need and can just remove the stuff they won't.
Ok, so the concept / rules, the order may look weird but...
Every device would contain the Global tab, which would be (nearly) identical except for defaults
The global tab should contain all the options the users would use to make the instrument easy to use with their MIDI controller, plus some general options. They users would simply set the parameters they need to be set somehow (e.g. velocity response is often different, pitch bend range is relevant for MPE...) and lock them. What they don't lock will default to whatever the instrument designer chooses.
There was this idea about having this placed somewhere else, outside of the instruments themselves, but that could be a problem, since some instruments may need different default and they may even need more/less of these parameters.
Every device should be MPE compliant unless it really doesn't make sense
MPE is an important part of the market, so we should embrace that
. Supporting it is actually very simple - providing controls for timbre and pressure (where pressure is relevant for non-MPE MIDI keyboards too). Plus the "Use timbre" and "Use pressure" controls on the global section. This may be a little complication for the preset design, but hopefully not too much and would help the users if their response to these 3D controllers is too "strong". We can provide a set of MIDI files with performances from various MPE controllers, so that every one can test it. For say drums it wouldn't make much sense, so it's not mandatory, but I'd say it's highly recommended to make everything MPE compliant.
Should we also provide a set of MIDI controllers that need to be used by default???
Not sure about this, because every MIDI keyboard provides different controllers, but we could start of with MPE again by providing some access to the ROLI Seaboard MIDI controllers, I didn't check yet but hopefully they chose wisely
.In any case mod wheel and expression pedal sound like a good thing to provide every time, don't they?
Generator tab and Effects tab should (not must) be separated, there are no rules about Generator tab
Generator tab is where the users should be controlling the sound properties of each instrument. For some of them the set of controls & effects could be so little, that both generator and effects would be in the same tab.
Should we have some controls that every instrument would have? People were proposing stuff like filters, but I can hardly see a few to make that happen for every instrument. If you imagine a bass drum, EDM bass, piano, some ambient FX... they don't have much in common. So I'm inclined not to have any requirements here. Ideas?
Effects tab in the template contains a full set of effects, that doesn't mean all need to be used
Basically instrument designers would start with the template, do their magic and may or may not keep the effects, add more... There's really no restrictions. I was thinking about predefining the reverb/delay/distortion MP numbers, so that the devices are compatible with each other, but end the end there wouldn't be much use anyways. So I'd say this is all just to make designer's life easier - there's the full set of effects, they can tweak them to make them sound good with the particular sound, remove them, change the order... whatever. Or delete it all
. Personally I think these effects are almost always handy, but still...Instruments have their own presets
Title of each instrument now contains presets too. So basically you create some more complex instrument and then create presets for it. The problem here is there is no global database now, that would contain all presets of all instruments... that may be needed at the end.
Anyways this thing is more like Kontakt style.
Instruments are categorized on the left side, plus folder structure, plus in the future hashtags
It turns out there's pretty infinite number of genres etc., so creating categories for everything would be pointless, so currently there's quite of exhaustive set, but stuff like EDM is generalized under one tab. Most sounds are useful for many genres anyways. And if one creates something really specific, then they can just mark it say #techno and the search will work with that too (it doesn't now, but...).
So at the end not many rules
Now there's an interesting question - global presets on top of the plugin. Technically one can create these too and they may be handy, but they also may be confusing... not sure yet. Any ideas?
Let me know what you think
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