Hi Alex... I agree 100% with you. I have been commenting on this limitaion/problem since the release of the VI. I can't stress how much it bugs me, and limiting it is to me. I assume one of the ideas behind the VI was to have as much playability as possible, yet all this controller on/off stuff really works against that philosophy.
Here are a few possible solutions:
1) Have a local On/Off on a patch, cell or matrix level which overwrites the global one (assuming you dont remove the global one completely)
2) Revaluate the need for making it Global. Perhaps it was not so needed as you thought? You did this earlier regarding the RAM allocation. To begin with two instances with Violins loaded, used twice the ram because of the Ram optimizer. You then reevaluated and improved the VI a lot! What I'm getting at is that perhaps the reasons you made it global dont really apply, and that you could improve it by making it at least at a Matrix level, rather than instance level.
3) Add an option of making On and Off two seperate controllers/keys, rather than just one as it is now. This would make things easier in the sequencer to just hit a key when you need it on, and a key when you need it off. The problem with the current way of doing it is that when you are running the VI on slave computers you can't always see if it's on or off. So having spereate keys would let me hit the "on" key before a section where it has to be on, without worrying about whether or not it was on or off at the beginning.
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And while I have your attention here is an additions I would like:
It would be great if I could make a patch monophonic so when I layer it with a legato instrument it stops playing the current pitch, and plays another when I hit a new key.