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Chord mode works again!
Last night, while I was pouring over the code trying to work out how I
broke Chord mode. My elder son was playing the Poly 800, and since he
is only just learning music synthesis principles he tends to press a
lot of buttons (often in frustration) as he doesn't understand all of
the parameters yet. So while he was playing around with the keyboard,
all of a sudden it starts playing chords the way it normally would. I
said "how did you do that?", he had no idea. So I shoo-ed him off
(nicely) and had a look at it and incredibly, I have actually
introduced a bug that improves chord mode by doing exactly what I had
wanted it to do.
The "NEW" chord mode plays chords according to how you set the chord
up in hold mode. So you select hold mode and then play a chord. Then
switch to chord mode and it plays chords exactly as you set the
progression up while in hold mode. This means you can now play, major,
minor, diminished etc chords all up and down the keyboard.
Now, the question is how did this happen? The answer is reasonably
simple. The initialization code for chord mode has become damaged
whereby it does not set up the initial chord progression. But this is
all good because i) I now know where to look for the bug and ii) I now
know that hold and chord mode use the same memory for playing and
storing notes. Which means that through this bug and with my sons
help, we are back on track again and we got a new cool feature as
well. And finally, I have a good idea of where to look to fix the
initialization. Something which we'll provide a parameter for us to
turn on or off. So that you get old chord mode and you get the new if
you wish too.
I now you return you back to normal programming.
Mike.