Dynamic velocity remapping

You can remap whole layers over velocity through a real-time velocity envelope. This is like the inverse of having a velocity curve, in that you are keeping the incoming velocity as it is, but you are changing the placement of Zones over the velocity range.

Interactive attack and release trim

With Keymap you can select a portion of a sample, or a Zone, or even multiple Zones, and tweak a slider for trimming the attack to a desired dB level. The same can be done for the release. This lets you select your Zones containing raw samples, set the two values—andyou’re done! When you are doing this on a single Zone or single Sample, the trim points are visualized in realtime

Group chain editor

A Group chain is a sequence of Groups that will repeat in a “round robin” fashion. Keymap offers a dedicated and intuitive graphical editor for creating Group chains. You can connect Groups through graphical connections so that it’s very easy to visualize the chains at any time

Flexible parameter entry

It’s possible to enter parameters for multiple zone selections with special operations, making editing more flexible than ever.When you have multiple selections, typing “++” before a value in a parameter box, that value is added equally to each selected item. Similarly, you can spread a range of values to  a set of selected zones

Audition mode

With only a few key presses, you can define an area to play repeatedly, even across the end of a loop. When you adjust the sample start or loop position, the playback area will move with the parameter, allowing you to continuously preview the change without waiting for a complete playback cycle around the loop (which is very desirable when editing loop points, for example).

Advanced sample naming and renaming

When rendering new samples, or simply renaming existing samples, Keymap offers a highly sophisticated parameter-based naming system, where you can combine more than 20 different parameters (as Zone name, project name, low and high notes, velocities, root note, date, time, etc) into the new sample name. It becomes very simple to create samples with the name structure that best suits your needs. When you create new samples you can use the parameters also for creating subfolders.

The User Experience

Keymap Pro is a unique realtime environment where you can import your instruments and samples and tweak, edit, loop, re-synthesize, spatialize and much much more. The overall concept is “Photoshop for sampled instruments”, and   the hundreds and hundreds of tools and functions offered in the application can be combined as building blocks to achieve the most creative results. Every traditional aspect of sampling has been revisited, improved  and automated so you can focus on your sound and not on an endless series of mouse operations.

Automapping

When creating instruments from scratch, the most arduous task is to load each sample, assign the proper root notes and adjust the Zone borders. Keymap offers several Automapping functions that let you place samples over the Keyboard automatically by using DSP pitch detection, or mapping data from the sample files, or the root name embedded in the sample filenames.  Similarly, you can automap velocities by using the Power detection, Decay speed or Spectral content for the samples.

Remapping

Sometimes you might need to rearrange Zones. Keymap offers an extensive selection of remapping functions. You can remap to white or black keys only, or you can compact Zones toward low notes or high notes, or remap them from a certain note with a certain interval, etc...

You can swap the two most recently played Zones, or expand Zones to fill the whole map. You can also simplify existing complex instruments by setting how much you want to reduce the number of Zones. Once Zones are set to the proper root note, you can also have Keymap build the Zone ranges for you.

Custom Remapper

Import Magic Pads

In each Instrument editor you have a set of Magic Pads, which are drag and drop destinations for sample files.

Each Magic Pad performs a series of actions over the dropped samples. Among the various available functions, with Magic Pads you can autosplit and autotrim samples, then automap them, and finally autoloop them. This lets you go from the raw recording to a playable instruments in seconds, so that you can concentrate on fine tuning the results.

Export Magic Pads

In a similar way to what you can do with the Import Magic Pads, a set of three Magic Pads in the lower-right part of the Instrument editor let you export samples, loops and MIDI files from slices , with a simple drag and drop from the pads to the finder.

In this way it’s very simple to use Keymap Pro not just for instruments but also as a scratchpad for your samples processing.

Tessellation engine

“Tessellation” refers to the creation of repeated shapes that do not overlap or have any gaps, which very often is exactly how you want to create sample Zones. The Instrument editor uses a tessellation engine which will automatically cut Zones in order to make space for others, and allows you to add Zones or delete map areas without having to edit all affected Zones directly. Slide Over and Slide Under modes let you protect either the edited Zones, or the unedited Zones when dragging Zones.

Slicing, slice mapping and loop remix

You can slice a sample manually, at regular points or at transient points, and then shift the content of individual slices around. Slices can be played back using a continuous crossfade system allowing glitch-free playback. Through cursor keys commands you can navigate across slices and shift their content in real time and very intuitively, effectively remixing the content and saving these variations with a click. This is especially interesting with rhythmic loops. You can also select slices and map them to individual notes on the Keyboard

Tune and Pitch functions

There are functions dedicated to automatically setting the proper amount of fine tuning correction to samples. These apply to multiple zones at once. In particular, the spectral tuner offers a completely new and innovative way to set the proper tuning for your samples. You can now fine tune your samples and pick the “best tuned” candidates in a very visual and interactive way through a graphical spectrum view

Audio FX, Dimensional Pan and modulations

Each Keymap Zone offers a set of individually configurable Low Pass and High Pass filters with adjustable frequency and resonance. Keymap also includes a couple of saturators, a stereo width reducer/expander, a gain and a dimensional pan control.

The dimensional pan control is a psychoacoustic modeled pan control with enhanced spatial effect.

These simple effects allow you to mix and match and fine tune different samples so that they fit together better, and these effects can be also used to combine several layers of sounds harmonically so that, for example, one layer plays the low frequency portion of the sound over the whole keyboard range, while another layer just adds the top frequencies (imagine a low pass filtered grand piano layered to a high pass filtered rhodes).

As always, the settings are editable individually Zone by Zone, or by selecting and editing multiple Zones at once.

All the AudioFX parameters can be modulated in realtime.

Render in place

Since all of the processing you can apply to Zones in Keymap is done in realtime, from time to time you may wish to write some of your edits in stone to new files, without having to save/ export instruments.

The process should be ideally carried when you reached an editing milestone, but it’s of course up to you and your workflow how and when (and if!) to reach for these commands.

Playback Personalities

The instrument formats supported by Keymap have some very different features, and sometimes the features in one format have no equivalents in the others. For example, the NNXT Reason format has no support for round robin playback, which is instead available in the EXS24 and Kontakt. Similarly, even if the EXS24 and Kontakt can do round robin playback of samples, they do it in a slightly different way. The same problem also happens for amplitude envelopes, as the EXS24 has just one AMP envelope at the setup level, while other formats have individually assignable envelopes for groups and/or zones.

For this reason, it is not possible to have a single playback mode that accurately reflects all the peculiarities of the various formats.  Keymap offers a solution to this problem via format personalities.

When you select a personality, Keymap will change its playback mode to reflect the personality of the corresponding instrument format. All these personalities are maintained in parallel in a project, so you can tweak some aspects of the EXS24 personality, and then switch to the Kontakt personality to fine tune Kontakt-specific parameters.