What is an "Effect"?

Keysight's visuals can be broken up into two categories: Scene elements, and Effect elements.

An "effect" in Keysight is any element that is spawned when a note is played. The full list of effects is as follows:

• Note objects - Blocks that represent pitch and duration of notes, and move in a straight line.
• Note lights - Invisible, rectangular light sources that shine down from above note objects.
• Keypresses - Extra surface overlaid onto the virtual piano to indicate which keys are currently held down.
• Impact lights - Invisible point light source that indicate which keys are held down / audible.
• Pulses - Single (large) square planes with highly configurable size / path / opacity and modes of operation.
• Particles - Many (small) square planes with highly configurable pathing, often thousands per particle system.

The following image is the default "Quicksilver" Preset with only Effect elements enabled:

Useful information

Performance

Effects are the source of almost all performance cost in Keysight. See the guide for more information about the relative costs of different effects.

Clarity

Keysight has no limits on Pulses and Particles, nor any sane restrictions on brightness of lighting. However, carefully consider what it is you're trying to show with Keysight, and avoid visual clutter that detracts from that goal.

Purpose

It can be useful to conceptualise Effects in a few broad categories in order to decide how to build up the look of each Effect. This is how I think about Effects:

• "Emphasis" effects - elements intended to give weight to note events. This includes things like "Burst" Particles, or "Fast ring" Pulses.

• "Velocity" effects - elements with heavy velocity response to visually represent contours in musical intensity. This could be something like colour settings in the Velocity mode, Particles with heavily-variable path stretching and speed(*), or Pulses that only activate at specific velocity thresholds.(*)

• "Indicator" effects - elements that just show a note event as cleanly as possible, such as Note objects or Keypresses with no dynamic velocity response on colour or brightness.