This page covers:

  • What is "Turbo note testing"
  • Configuration of turbo note testing

Graphics > Turbo note testing

What is "turbo note testing"?

Turbo testing

This is Keysight's system for auto-generating random notes in order to help test presets without having to actually play anything or play back a MIDI file. It can also be used to get a ballpark estimate of how performant a preset is.

How it works

Notes are generated with a random note index (that is, they are randomly distributed across the whole keyboard) at a constant rate as set by the turbo note testing configuration, with a random velocity and duration. The spawned notes always use the selected, active preset even if Automation > Channel-to-preset mapping(*) is enabled.

Turbo note testing will be automatically disabled during render-to-video operations, if it happens to be enabled.

The random notes spawned by this testing mode are "seeded" by default, i.e. not truly random. Note spawning will loop after a given time to give a perfectly consistent looping window of activity.

Note

This was originally added to help with generating promotional material for Keysight! It's very satisfying to have a huge number of notes doing stuff, and I wanted it to be configurable in loop duration for targeting Steam's 5MB GIF file size limit.

Activating turbo note testing

Turbo note testing can be activated in three ways:

  • The small toggle in the top left of the menu
  • The keyboard shortcut Shift + Q
  • The controller shortcut Y / Triangle

Toggle location

Configuration

Presets

Clicking any of these buttons will immediately adjust all other turbo note testing settings to pre-defined values.

Info

Standard is somewhat representative of "average" real-world performance, although due to the nature of turbo note testing spawning a constant rate of notes rather than sets of chords, turbo note testing is a little "smoother" on performance cost than real-world usage (even if the overall framerate is similar).

Settings

All of these are very self-explanatory, with the exception of Random generation seed changing this integer will cause notes to be generated in a slightly different way.

Settings

Info

Random generation seed is probably only useful to me as the developer for generating promotional material, where using a slow notes-per-second value and short loop can result in some random seeds giving undesirable note distributions.

If Loop random spawning after set time is enabled, all currently-held notes will be released when the loop window expires.

Info

If a new note is attempting to spawn on a note index that already has a note active on it, the new note is simply dropped and will not spawn. With suitably high notes-per-second and/or note duration, this explains why the spawn rate drops below the actual target set as some notes are dropped when they attempt to spawn. (Personal note: I can't believe I'm bothering to explain this insanely niche bit of Keysighting...)

Best practices

Use keyboard hotkeys

Hitting Shift + Q to toggle turbo note testing in combination with E to temporarily hide the menu is an incredibly efficient way of testing your preset! You can also use Ctrl + Backspace to forcibly clear the active area if you've made some changes and want to get rid of effects that are no longer representative of your preset.

Stress test your computer

If livestreaming, turbo note testing can also be helpful for ensuring you're not going to run into performance issues while using your preset before you run into them in a live scenario. the Heavy preset is overkill and unrepresentative of most peoples' piano abilities, so if your computer can safely render Heavy at 60+fps, you know you're going to be safe in a live context.