I’m just trying to understand this fundamental structure.
A zone is what holds the core sound (synth or sample). I might have one zone for a snare, or 88 zones for a piano roll.
A layer (this is where I get confused) holds zones. I can use a layer to house similar zones, ex. I have kick, snare, HH - 3 zones all on one layer.
Or I can use layers to stack zones as velocity layers. In this case I have 3 kicks, velocity split (stacked). Each split is a layer? So that kick zone has 3 layers? If all 3 zones have 3 velocity layers in effect, that program has a total of 9 zones?
OR should I consider each set a layer. Kick is layer 1, Snare layer 2, so on.
Please help wrap my head around this, I cannot go further until I understand it. The manual does not a good job of breaking this fundamental structure down.
A layer (this is where I get confused) holds zones. I can use a layer to house similar zones, ex. I have kick, snare, HH - 3 zones all on one layer.
Yep.
Or I can use layers to stack zones as velocity layers
.
This too.
OR should I consider each set a layer. Kick is layer 1, Snare layer 2, so on.
Could do, yes.
Whenever you need to be able to select, effect, or operate on a set of zones independently, then Layers are what you use to ‘group’ the zones together in order to do that, e.g. :-
Organising → quickly selecting sets of zones
Editing → adjusting the parameters of several zones together
Effecting > add effects to groups of zones
Playing → use modifiers to control which zones play.
Etc etc.
What exactly a layer contains is up to you, and will depend on what you want to do to, or how you want to treat those zones, how & where you use layers is not fixed in any way.
The last line is exactly what I was wanting to hear.
It is what I thought it was, layers are not so much like Photoshop layers, but rather Photoshop layer ‘folders’ which house layers and allow me to group process/activate/move individual layers. Difference is that of course we do not have to stack the folders, we can have 2 equal level folders side by side to group zones in the same hierarchy.
I was confused with concern to velocity, but I get that they are still layers of zones within a layer… actually they do not have to be used as level velocity but any change affected by midi velocity input … which again clears up the idea of stacking sample zones.