Multichannel microsequencer?

[skinpop]

Yep, it’s my kind of sequencing too.

Grids driving this, with one channel clocking the 8s,or what have you, and another triggering the env/ vca on the voice is ungodly. Trust me. Use the third grids to clock an s/h and you have infinite riffs at your fingertips.

First time I patched this, I literally screamed. Now my live set is all done like this using 2 or 3 plaits, braids, chainsaw, grids and an EC. A Single cv sequencer mults to Sinfonion which is the quantiser and s/h in one. One pitch source drives everything, but it’s not just pedaling unisons, and it’s all infinitely tweakable. Riffs pour out of it.

I’m not sure this set up, or an equivalent, can be beaten for improvising. The system spits out kick ass EDM for fun. Never a bum note. No two sessions the same. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: for house music, this kind of setup is voodoo.

/end rant.

You could top the trimmers of course, although I haven’t bothered. I attenuate the cv out a bit to make the pot a bit tighter for pitch though.

Joranalogue Step 8 is gold for this kind of sequencing.

[Arrandan]

Grids driving this, with one channel clocking the 8s,or what have you, and another triggering the env/ vca on the voice is ungodly. Trust me. Use the third grids to clock an s/h and you have infinite riffs at your fingertips.

First time I patched this, I literally screamed. Now my live set is all done like this using 2 or 3 plaits, braids, chainsaw, grids and an EC. A Single cv sequencer mults to Sinfonion which is the quantiser and s/h in one. One pitch source drives everything, but it’s not just pedaling unisons, and it’s all infinitely tweakable. Riffs pour out of it.

Great patch tip, pure inspiration!

I just looked at the Sinfonion. Is that what we call a 'battleship quantiser'? I think I'll start with the Bard's Quartet & support my local Eurorack community (fellow Belgian, Shakmat, like Joranalogue & others)

[Keltie]

Grids driving this, with one channel clocking the 8s,or what have you, and another triggering the env/ vca on the voice is ungodly. Trust me. Use the third grids to clock an s/h and you have infinite riffs at your fingertips.

First time I patched this, I literally screamed. Now my live set is all done like this using 2 or 3 plaits, braids, chainsaw, grids and an EC. A Single cv sequencer mults to Sinfonion which is the quantiser and s/h in one. One pitch source drives everything, but it’s not just pedaling unisons, and it’s all infinitely tweakable. Riffs pour out of it.

Great patch tip, pure inspiration!

I just looked at the Sinfonion. Is that what we call a 'battleship quantiser'? I think I'll start with the Bard's Quartet & support my local Eurorack community (fellow Belgian, Shakmat, like Joranalogue & others)

/Hyperbole incoming.

No, Sinfonion is not a battleship quantiser.

It is a nuclear carrier battle group quantiser.

/end hyperbole.

[Jeffmhopkins]

I just want express how awesome the Sinfonion can be for sequencing harmony... you can sequence chords and feed randoms to it and create a cohesive whole. It's not menu divey and very hands on. It's pretty much the bees knees. /Sinfonion love.

[Keltie]

Grids driving this, with one channel clocking the 8s,or what have you, and another triggering the env/ vca on the voice is ungodly. Trust me. Use the third grids to clock an s/h and you have infinite riffs at your fingertips.

Hi Keltie!

Thank you for the nice patch tip
If you don’t mind, could you go into detail a bit more?

What are you sampling with the s/h and where are you sending it in this example? Are you using it to s/h the sequence of the 8s before it goes somewhere or to create polyphony?

It’s almost too good to share, but I’m a generous soul, so…

This is a long, detailed answer, so pull up a chair.

First, due respect to both Steevio and Mylar. Their videos were foundational for me in exploring this way of working, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

That said, I believe I’ve taken their techniques a stage further, and I’m not aware of anyone else who does this quite as I do, though, of course, there may be some others out there….it is an advanced form of note spinning, which is well known, but with an extra, critical step.

The first thing of course, is the module line up. You can sub in anything you like that will give you the same functionality.

A 16s clock. I use beatstep/key step, using one of the drum tracks to fire 16 gates per bar, and further drum gates to fire resets at step 16 or step 1 as needed (RTFM)

Use this to clock a multi channel step sequencer. I use both grids and EC at the same time, both in Euclidean mode, though pattern modes would work too.

Send a reset ( more on this later) once per bar / 2 bars / 4 bars to save your sanity, and correct any dropped clocks or other quirks. Or don’t, but I find the reset helps to keep it all tidy.

Let’s look at grids and braids. Grids has three channels.

Grids channel one clocks my cv sequencer. Both get reset at the head of a bar anyway, so step 1 of my 16 clock is always step 1 of the cv sequence, and grids.

The pitch sequencer cv out is multed and goes to all of my Sinfonion pitch ins.

Grids channel two goes to the trigger of a Sinfonion pitch channel, which acts as an S/H. This quantised and held pitch cv feeds braids pitch cv input.

Grids channel three triggers braids, so no vca/env needed here.

Think through what happens when I manipulate the density of the grids patterns…..

1- select the next cv value by advancing the pitch sequencer. This becomes a non regular cv sequencer clock, which an 8s or Ladik, and others, are perfectly happy with.

2- lock the current cv value to the braids pitch. New pitches at the Sinfonion in are ignored until this input gets a trigger. Sinfonion has triggers for every channel, and these are the s/h I’m referring to.

3- actually trigger a note. I don’t hear anything until this fires a trigger.

Then, Euclidean Circles. Same principle. It has 6 channels, and I use them as three pairs. In each pair, one trigger hits the trigger input of a Sinfonion channel, and the other fires a voice, whether via env/ vca, or module alone as in the braids example above.

Sinfonion chord channel has three outs attached to chainsaw. ( or 4 to an e370). It will build a triad ( or extended, 4 note chord) based on the root note of the last selected note, with the intervals being manually selected ( or internally sequenced, but I don’t bother with that)

Sinfonion arp channel will build arps of a root note with tweakable pitch and range, and various patterns available.It needs a clock too, and that can be non regular as well.

Going back to grids/ braids, and thinking through a specific example….

Channel 1 - full density. My pitch cv moves forward step for step. An 8s will play its full sequence twice per bar.
Channel 2 - half density. The pitch is held for two steps each, or aka, braids ignores the pitch cv of every second step
Channel 3 - six triggers per bar. Braids plays a tresillo figure twice per bar on steps 1,4,6,9,12,14. The pitches of these notes are dictated by the combination of the first two channels of grids.

Remember EC is doing much the same thing for other channels, all independently.

What takes this beyond trad note spinning, as I understand it, is the number of independent and separately triggered s/h channels, and the separation of the s/h triggers and the voice triggers

Pull Grids channel 2 density down… braids hold a pitch and pedals it
Pull Grids channel 1 down….ALL VOICES pedal.
Pull Grids channel 3 down…. Braids plays less often. The pitch may pedal, or not.

Modulate any or all of these as you see fit.

We haven’t even got into the meat of Sinfonion yet. First, the pitch is quantised to any key and mode you like. Second, you can selectively pull individual pitches out of the allowed pitch list, individually per channel. So, braids can play just root, 3, 5; another channel could play just root, 5,7,9.

Coming out of the detail, and taking an overview, what are we achieving?

We’re separating the link we usually use in sequencing, that at some point in time, an event is triggered, tied to a pitch.

This system separates all of that. Braids will happily keep playing a pitch from five steps ago, until its Sinfonion channel is triggered. That note could be modified so that if it’s, say, 4, it could play 5 or 3 instead. Whilst another channel DOES play 4. Or is playing another note from the sequence all together. A single cv sequence is multed out to become independent pitch lines across all voices, with a selectable triad chord and an arp based on the selected note, on top of the single voice channels. And the actual note density is also variable. Even if braids is seeing new notes, it doesn’t actually play them until yet another channel of the trigger sequencers tells it to.

I’ve tried to be quite careful in describing this, I hope it’s clear. It took quite a lot of thinking and rebuilding to get this set up right, and it is moderately complex, but once the penny drops and you have this working, it’s like a whole new world. Once again, I’ll say it. Absolute fucking voodoo for making bass lines on the fly, and in fact, complete arrangements. Stick this over a 4/4 beat and you can ( and I do) improvise effective EDM for as long I like. I compose and arrange on the fly, and it’s never the same twice.

Final thoughts….

Have mutes available,( I have 2x div kid) and pay attention to your resets, and where they need to be ( although chucking those into odd places on the fly is yet another way to change patterns up as you play.) I find attenuating cv down to maybe 2 volts, and making liberal use of the octave offsets in braids and plaits is important to separate bass, lead, treble and chord lines.

I run this as follows:

Key step pro for clocks, drum patterns and also a master transpose off the keyboard into Sinfonion.

I cheat and use pico drums and a Bitbox for drums and texture samples ( movie dialogue, old news clips, etc etc)

Grids, and EC for triggers. 8s,or Ladik for pitch cv. Stepper acid and westlicht performer also work if I want stored and pre quantised sequences available.

Buff mults for everything, including clocks, plus some stack cables.

Voices are braids for bass, 2x plaits for lead and arp. Chords come from chainsaw, or e370, using Sinfonion chord generator, or a third plaits in chord mode, fed with a single root with the chord selected locally. ( m7 FTW) I sub in other voices sometimes. I have a few.

Of course, there are filters, env, lfos, logic, mixers, FX, and all that good stuff too. ( branches is a nice addition to this )

I started playing a few gigs in 2019, and was getting some traction, but then covid. Just starting up again now, but have moved away from the big city in the meantime, so it’s harder to do….

Any questions, class?

[pabatak]

I feel like I was randomly wandering in the woods and suddenly came across a majestic unicorn in a clearing.

Thanks Keltie!

Now if you’ll excuse me I have a case to reorganize.

[skinpop]

Keltie thanks for the writeup. I've been doing something similar but without a Sinfonion and I'm starting to think that it's neither VCA's, attenuators or envelopes but rather S/H's that one never can have too many of.

Any questions, class?

In your example the pitch and env-trigger going into braids are un-synchronized - that's the entire point - but won't you get mid note pitch updates sometimes, especially if you have a long envelope tail? I find that to keep things clean I need to resync pitch to trigger after quantization, which basically amounts to using yet one more S/H before (to continue using your example) braids. Are you doing something else or do you just tolerate the occasional mid-node pitch change? I suppose this also could be handled with a logical AND gate for a slightly different result, i.e. only update pitch on steps that have a trigger at the same time.

[pabatak]

I wonder if in Keltie's setup the accent outputs could be put to good use, like instead of using trigger outputs of 2 channels for note & env, use trigger and accent outs of a single channel, so 1 Grids channel to drive 1 voice. Don't have a Grids (yet), so not exactly sure how the accent out behaves, but might try that soon.

[Keltie]

Keltie thanks for the writeup. I've been doing something similar but without a Sinfonion and I'm starting to think that it's neither VCA's, attenuators or envelopes but rather S/H's that one never can have too many of.

Any questions, class?

In your example the pitch and env-trigger going into braids are un-synchronized - that's the entire point - but won't you get mid note pitch updates sometimes, especially if you have a long envelope tail? I find that to keep things clean I need to resync pitch to trigger after quantization, which basically amounts to using yet one more S/H before (to continue using your example) braids. Are you doing something else or do you just tolerate the occasional mid-node pitch change? I suppose this also could be handled with a logical AND gate for a slightly different result, i.e. only update pitch on steps that have a trigger at the same time.

You are quite right, that can happen, and running the triggers through logic prevents it. In my experience, it’s a minor issue as I rarely run a combo of dense triggers into both inputs at the same time. Most often, my cv is moving 3-5 steps per bar, my pitch is changing similarly to a little less, and I rarely run more than 11-12 triggers per bar, unless I’m pulling in a fill on the density knob.

I also generally use fairly short sounds, at mid tempos by EDM standards, 120-130 bpm.

So, you’re absolutely correct in seeing the potential issue, and the solution, but in my context it’s rarely needed. If it does happen, it can sound quite groovy actually.

Loosely connected to this, I have the 4ms trigger delay active in the braids option menu, and I find my pitches are clean with that setting on. At no delay, you get the odd slide.

More generally, “ you can never have too many xxxx” where xxxx represents every function there is. After many, many years with hardware and DAWS, I went fully modular, and from 6x84 to 21x168 and 9x84 in about four years….. just don’t pick up the phone when the bank manager calls…..
.

[Keltie]

I wonder if in Keltie's setup the accent outputs could be put to good use, like instead of using trigger outputs of 2 channels for note & env, use trigger and accent outs of a single channel, so 1 Grids channel to drive 1 voice. Don't have a Grids (yet), so not exactly sure how the accent out behaves, but might try that soon.

Good point, and it can be. I find it a bit opaque though, and only use them in a pinch. A Grids FW that made better use of those outs would be stellar, but I’m not aware of one ( haven’t looked too hard) TBH, and note to self, I need to scope them and remind myself what they do in Euclidean. Dividers and logic can work to add extra stuff.I have a couple of branches, a Ladik cv-able divider and the Doepfer too.

Any mutable hackers out there….what we need is a setting that uses those accent outs to either play a rotated version, or an inverted version of the main out, or some controllable variation. That’s a challenge with the UI as it is. Assuming it isn’t already staring me in the face, that is! Without the accents, I have 9 triggers total already. It’s usually enough. If I’m using the Ladiks, I have 3x S180 which can set an 8 step trigger pattern by hand, and if stepper acid, also a programmable gate and accent out. Marbles too. At some stage, you run out of hands. Yeah, yeah, I know : “ you can never have too many pedal interfaces” …Sigh.

Also on grids… drum seq mode works really well with this patch, but it a little less predictable than Euclidean, so I prefer the latter, but for sure, both work.

[Keltie]

I feel like I was randomly wandering in the woods and suddenly came across a majestic unicorn in a clearing.

Thanks Keltie!

Now if you’ll excuse me I have a case to reorganize.

That may be the single sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.

The wife was reduced to “ I’ll slide the food under the door, then”, years ago.

[JES]

Thanks Keltie. I loved your description. Sounds like a ton of fun to play.

[playersteve19]

I used to have a Doboz Prizma which does two channels of cv/gate in 6hp. The original is glitchy, but the Prizma+ version has a lot of nice features. Both have a row of 16 multicolor LEDs down the side as the entire interface and menu system (and they have adjustable. brightness. ). Unfortunately a bit unobtanium because as far as I know, the manufacturer shut down while working on the next revision of the thing. And if you do find one on reverb, make sure the seller provides you with pictures of the back panel.

Bit of a learning curve, but I still wish mine would have booted up consistently because it was such a delight to use. That said, the guy I bought it from used it a lot and might not have built it right. It’s a great module as long as you’re careful when buying—again, if you can get one.

[skinpop]

The wife was reduced to “ I’ll slide the food under the door, then”, years ago.

I wonder how that works practically. Do you get pancakes and crepes with the toppings shaved of at the other side of the door every single day?

[SavageMessiah]

An ornament and crime running the hemispheres firmware (or a derivative, like benispheres) can run 2 separate sequencers of various types that run off of independent triggers. The "normal" sequencer only has 5 steps though. The various generative sequencers are longer.

[Keltie]

The wife was reduced to “ I’ll slide the food under the door, then”, years ago.

I wonder how that works practically. Do you get pancakes and crepes with the toppings shaved of at the other side of the door every single day?

We’ve found that toast and shallow bowls of gruel work quite well.

[pabatak]

At some stage, you run out of hands. Yeah, yeah, I know : “ you can never have too many pedal interfaces” …Sigh.

"You can never have too many hands"

[pabatak]

The wife was reduced to “ I’ll slide the food under the door, then”, years ago.

I wonder how that works practically. Do you get pancakes and crepes with the toppings shaved of at the other side of the door every single day?

Depends on the door

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[Arrandan]

This is a long, detailed answer, so pull up a chair.
(Mother of all snips)
Any questions, class?

I'm off the forum for a day and I miss the best post of the year! Incredibly rich description, Keltie! I've played around with separation of pitch and trigger before, but this is inspirational. Thanks!

[Keltie]

This is a long, detailed answer, so pull up a chair.
(Mother of all snips)
Any questions, class?

I'm off the forum for a day and I miss the best post of the year! Incredibly rich description, Keltie! I've played around with separation of pitch and trigger before, but this is inspirational. Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words, and you’re welcome.

Great thread.

[Keltie]

Thanks Keltie. I loved your description. Sounds like a ton of fun to play.