2 things that would be useful in combination:
- (The easy part): Color code MIDI notes by their MIDI channel
- (The hard part): Provide the option to configure a MIDI track/bus to spawn n instances of the track’s instrument plugin, each instance receiving midi events for one specific MIDI channel number (with the possible exception of the last instance, which could receive events for all MIDI channels >= n-1). When you open the instrument plugin GUI, it opens the first instance’s GUI, and syncs the parameters between instances. This would function similarly to how Ardour currently handles, for example, mono audio plugins on a stereo track.
- it would be useful to also provide an option to rewrite the channel number of an event to 1 before sending it to its corresponding plugin instance, so that plugins that aren’t fully midi channel aware can still get per-channel mod wheel and stuff. I’m not sure if this is a common limitation in instrument plugins or if this is a non-issue.
- What would be really cool would be enable per-midi-channel versions of plugin automation, so that a specific channel can independently modify an instrument parameter without having to commit to a whole separate MIDI track. In this case it would probably make sense to color code some element of the automation element to match the notes.
I’d love to play around with using multiple instances of monophonic synths to do a more explicitly defined version of polyphony, imagine using portmanteau to morph between 2 chords, and having total control over the mapping of notes from chord A to chord B for example.