Hey friends. Just picked up a Prophet X recently after much hesitation (because of soooo many poor demos), but finally executed based on specs and intuition. Anywho I really have been appreciating this toolkit! Thanks so much Lady Gaia.
I'm always happy to hear from someone who has discovered the instrument - and found PXToolkit intriguing. I was excited by the potential of the instrument from the day it was announced, and got mine (serial #40!) just as soon as I could arrange it. The six-month wait for the official user sample import tool wasn't a surprise, but the state it showed up in was disappointing to say the least. It didn't take long for me to start thinking about how to put together something more complete for my own use, and sharing it with others seemed like a natural next step.
Couple noob questions:
1: How can you apply samples to just one key easily? It automatically spreads them across the keys. It generally will only let me drag them (closed) one way or another and not both, and when I try to type in the key value, it often doesn't take and is underlined in red.
The red underlining or inability to drag the top or bottom of a range beyond a certain point usually indicates that you're trying to move the bottom of the key range higher than the "root" note of the sample, or the top of the range below it. If you want a sample to be on a particular key you need to make sure this root note is on the key in question. There are a few ways to accomplish this:
- Create the .wav or .aiff tool using software that correctly sets the original root note, which is hidden inside the file itself.
- For files that don't have the root note set internally, name the file with the desired note as part of the filename (eg: "Drum Hit A#3.wav"
- For files where you want to override the internal note, you can name them appropriately and then hold the Alt or Option key down while dropping them to force PXToolkit to respect the note in the name.
- If you don't do any of the above, you can still change the root note after importing the sample. Select the sample in PXToolkit and you'll see descriptive information on the left which will show the top and bottom of the range as well as the sample length and root note (eg: 1.7s @ A#3.) Edit this root note to be the key where you want the sample to play back at its original pitch, and PXToolkit will move the sample and reset the top and bottom of the range to cover adjacent keys where possible.
Generally speaking, you shouldn't need to tweak the sample's range. As you add other samples to adjacent keys the range will automatically adjust to divide up space evenly across the keyboard. If you want you can change the range, but the original root note must always be inside the range you select. That's probably the "rule" you're violating that results in the red underlining to suggest that you're trying to do something you can't do.
2: Can you layer samples in this editor? I see you can round robin (which I love!) but sometimes you want to layer them. If not, do you guys know of an editor that can easily layer sounds and spit them into a wav?
The Prophet X doesn't support single instruments that trigger two samples at the same time, so you'll have to combine them before importing, as you suspected. I focused on tasks that are Prophet X specific rather than general waveform editing tools, so you'll have to use something else for this task. It should be pretty easy to drop two files into a DAW on different tracks and export the combination, however.
3: I spend a ton of time trying to get the volumes of samples even and often they still are not. Any tips for evening the volume across the board? Doesn't seem like you can edit the volume individually on PX.
It can be tricky. You should generally normalize sample volumes before importing them into the Prophet X as it doesn't offer any tools to help. I've used SampleRobot to do most of my sample editing, and it includes normalization tools. Note, however, that in human hearing "volume" is a complicated subject and just having the same peaks doesn't mean your samples will be the same perceived volume. Having a good set of analysis tools and an understanding of how to use compressors and expanders may be more ambitious than you had in mind, but if you want to go down that rabbit hole I can't recommend FabFilter's plug-ins enough. The videos on their YouTube channel are also a gold mine for understanding a variety of subjects and a great way to spend a few hours.
4: Can anyone point to some groovy threads? What have you all been coming up with in the PX lab? I'd love to see what kind of cool experimental soundscapes people have come up with. This machine seems deceptively expansive. I'm still honing in my prowess and then I'd love to share some stuff too.
I'll leave this to others who have posted a lot more demos here than I have.
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