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My understanding of how the NDLR transpose channel works is that it takes incoming midi notes from the key of C, and transposes them to the key and scale of the NDLR.
The idea is, presumably, that if you have an external controller, you always play in C major and you will never play a 'wrong' note. Novation Circuit has a similar feature to map scales to its pads. You move the root note and select the scale type, but play the pads similarly for all keys and scales (except chromatic). This is a helpful feature for many because it places guardrails around certain mistakes.
I want to be allowed to take the training wheels off. Many melodies have chromatic notes that are not 'wrong,' but are outside the selected scale of the NDLR. I want to be allowed to play those notes. Enough with the bumper bowling, if I gutter bowl I take full responsibility.
What I want it to do is take incoming midi notes, and transpose them into the key of the NDLR. If the incoming midi notes are rooted in C, and the NDLR's key is currently Bb, the NDLR would transpose them by a fixed -2 (or +10) semitones, disregarding whether the resulting note was in the selected scale. If I move the NDLR's key to D, now the transposition would be +2 (or -10) semitones. And so on.
Arturia has a similar feature with its sequencers eg Beatstep Pro. For a sequence you define the root note, then you can transpose the sequence on the fly by selecting another root note. To my understanding, this naively transposes the sequence by the interval between the root notes. There is no concept of scales, just transposing notes up or down.
To make it work in a similar way would require defining the incoming midi root in addition to what midi channel to transpose. Unless the incoming midi notes were assumed to have a root note of C all the time, which is oversimplified. Although C is a great default setting, if the root is forced to be C, then I can never play in any other key.
While on this topic, why not multiple channels of transposition? Assuming the hardware can do it, could be exposed to the user as a 'Transposition Matrix,' activating and selecting each channel, the original root of incoming notes, whether to use the scale or not, and whatever else related to the transposition (for instance there could be settings related to how the NDLR decides to transpose up or down, I can think of four: always up, always down, shortest distance from root (modulo six?) up first, and same down first). That would be a powerful feature.
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