Hey Zach, Lewis here. I made those mockups of the 41edo key mappings
and Jared showed me your photo of the working LED layout. I feel like
I could elaborate on what the idea behind them was and what I was
hoping could be possible with the Hexboard.

My original idea was mainly that there could be some way for people to
easily set up their own key colours alongside new note layouts, since
note layouts can be added pretty easily by editing the firmware. My
thinking was that you could do it by defining a set of colours and
either mapping each key on the board to a colour, or mapping each note
in a particular tuning to a colour. I figure it's possible that
someone might want to try different note colours for the same tuning
(like for that third 41edo layout, maybe it would be better to
recolour the notes so that the "rainbow" runs up and down the columns
instead of being scattered) but maybe that's kind of a niche case.

I should also clarify that I'm not fixed on the precise key layouts or
colours in those mockups, I just made them to see how a large tuning
might fit well on the board. I was looking at this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfZVnktJZdw as a reference for the key
colours. I'm also not really sure how the named notes (for 41edo, or
for other alt-tunings in general) should be matched to MIDI note
values since it would also depend on how you're tuning your plugins if
you're using it with a DAW.

Were there any questions you had about the layouts or about microtonal
stuff in general? The stuff you've added now for the tone-based
colours is looking pretty interesting.

Lewis

On Thu Feb 15, 2024 at 1:51 AM EST, Lewis McRae wrote:
> Hey Zach, Lewis here. I made those mockups of the 41edo key mappings
Thank you! It's one thing when Jared says 'people want X' vs actual pictures of what it looks like.

> My original idea was mainly that there could be some way for people to
> easily set up their own key colours alongside new note layouts, since
> note layouts can be added pretty easily by editing the firmware. My
> thinking was that you could do it by defining a set of colours and
> either mapping each key on the board to a colour, or mapping each note
> in a particular tuning to a colour. I figure it's possible that
> someone might want to try different note colours for the same tuning
Additional color modes can be added in the keyColor function like so

https://git.sr.ht/~earboxer/HexBoard/commit/bdcd88f14f17a83bfbcc6c32fd0c3d54dc29ff3d

'tuning to a color' is currently complicated, as our 'key' and 'transpose' options conflict a little and weren't designed for microtonal needs (i.e. needs a good refactor).

We're also thinking about changing 'layouts' to 'presets', e.g. "use this color scheme for that layout, with that number of tones"

> I should also clarify that I'm not fixed on the precise key layouts or
> colours in those mockups, I just made them to see how a large tuning
> might fit well on the board. I was looking at this video
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfZVnktJZdw as a reference for the key
> colours.
Looks like they have a warm/cold thing going on, with the brightness being used as a differentiator.

I'd love to have a name for the layouts/presets, but i guess it will take time to find what's best.

> Were there any questions you had about the layouts or about microtonal
> stuff in general? The stuff you've added now for the tone-based
> colours is looking pretty interesting.
What are the most popular microtonal scales?
Besides 'closeness to CDEFGAB', what's another way to highlight the notes that would be useful?