I recently played a gig that had plenty of bright lights. The lights hit the pads in a way that made it impossible for me to tell the difference between a pad that has a pattern and a pad that has an active pattern. I really quickly checked my settings and the brightness and contrast were already cranked so I just guessed my way through my set (mostly successfully). Do any of y’all have any tricks or settings I should try so I can better see the pads that are active in the track view?
I plan to test this out myself, but my gear will remain packed until I get back from the next one on Friday. Any ideas/tips are appreciated.
All I can think of is changing the colours of selected and deselected to colours wildly different to each other as that might help a bit?
Not sure what else you could do if you can’t see the pad lights at all. Maybe erect a shield around your Hapax?
Potentially (and destructively) drill through the middle of each pad so you can see the LED without the diffusion? That would be an extreme fix for sure, and might end up looking incredibly naff overall.
Edit: Nice lights, though, shame they were too bright.
I had the exact same problem when playing live outdoors in the early evening.
I was about to file a feature request to Squarp when I found the Palette settings in the manual. I haven’t tried to see if it helps yet, but it should do the trick.
I did a bunch of experimenting with it yesterday evening in the sun (not direct sun). I found I can almost do what I want, but I don’t really have access to the states needed in the palette settings to resolve my issue.
What I can customize:
VOID: empty patterns
VO-S: empty patterns (playing)
PLAY : has pattern
PL-S : has pattern (playing)
No matter what you set the color of for 3 and 4, in use it will be dimmed to about 50-70% brightness compared to the color you set. This is so when you select a track, the selected track pattern will become notably brighter. In my experimentation, this dimmed state made it pretty hard to distinguish colors when in a well-lit room even when I made them polar opposites.
What I’m thinking of proposing to Squarp is to give us access to additional states and be quite literal with the brightness rather than doing math to dim the color I set. This is what I might expect:
VOID: empty pattern
VO-S: empty pattern playing
VO-A: empty pattern playing and active (active track)
PLAY: has pattern
PL-S: has pattern playing
PL-A: has pattern playing and active (active track)
I would then request that it is up to us to handle the brightness for each state.
What do you think?
Side note: I suspect the LEDs can get a fair amount brighter than they currently are limited to, but there may be a reason they don’t get that bright.
I also tried this now and 100% agree with you. The states available at the moment are not the most useful. I guess the more states the better, I’m not sure if what you’re suggesting is a complete set of states, probably is.
The brightness can to some extent be set by the user with the current Red, Green and Blue amounts. A less bright red would for example be 25% red, 0% green and 0% blue.
The brightness can to some extend be set by the user with the current Red, Green and Blue amounts. A less bright red would for example be 25% red, 0% green and 0% blue.
Correct. That’s what I want, but is not how it works for a few of those values. They are only full brightness when the track is active and the pattern is selected. Otherwise, the pads with playing patterns or set patterns are whatever color I set, but at about 50-70% brightness of what I wanted.
It’s worth noting that there are some bugs with LED backlight behaviour (not sure exactly what it is) with the current stable firmware version. Though I would probably caution you against upgrading to the beta that has a fix for this issue since you are using it for performances and the beta is a bit unstable.
