Environment for making experimental step sequencer?

[Touch The Universe]

How about creating a piano roll with the features discussed in this thread? Possible?

[Sendy]

I suck at using REAKTOR!

Seriously, I can get my head around fully modular synths, but Reaktor just fills me with dread whenever I open the edit panel.

Can I be so bold as to encourage you to spend a weekend working through the NI tutorials? I think that when I first started with Reaktor I probably had a similar feeling towards it. The feeling didn't go away by just playing with it. I found that I had to work through some tutorials to really grok the details.

There might be better options for this particular use case, but, I don't think that there's a better option in general. I like Max as well, but, I still find that the more practical focus of the Reaktor library facilitates achieving my goals faster with Reaktor vs Max.

Here, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and show you how easy this is to do with the right bits in Reaktor.

This is from the monoliner sequencer "sync and position" macro with some slight modifications. I've added two controls. The first control feeds the mod/div module on the right of the screen. This was originally fed with the constant "16" which you can see right above the control. The part that you're talking about is accomplished by multiplying the original "order" value by some constant. That is, it steps by one and you want to have it step, e.g. by 15. Then when you compute multiples of 15 modulo 16, the sequencer steps backwards, as you'd expect. This was accomplished by adding the control labeled "mult" and the multiplication module. Playing with these two controls gives you a variety of different sequences.



You could put other arithmetic manipulation here to modify the step value that goes into the sequencer. You could make it step as a function of anything else you can extract, you could modify the number of steps with, e.g., an lfo so that the sequencing slowly changed over time at the rate set by the lfo.

This is the advantage of Reaktor. Once you figure out where to stuff in the bits you need, there is a vast library of completely customizable tools to stuff in there and you don't have to spend a lot of time finding or creating those tools.

It took me just a couple of minutes to modify the sequencer instrument further and add this draw LFO from the building blocks macros that allows me to add the LFO output to the multiplier synced to the midi clock. This then takes any sequence and gives you somewhat unpredictable, but entirely deterministic, permutations that are shift on musically meaningful intervals.

Thanks for the encouragement! I think the big kicker is that I'm not used to dealing with stuff like MIDI management, voice management, note priorities, the whole keyboard logic thing, etc, which have to be dealt with when creating from the ground up. That adds an unfamiliar layer of complexity to the already familiar complexity.

I'll set aside some time to work through the tutorials and post how I get on with it. I suspect part of my aversion is just innate laziness and excuses.

I think I have the right mind for Reaktor dabbling, I just have to find the discipline.

[Sendy]

Thanks to everyone else who suggested software. I'm currently looking through them all, though with some of the packages it's not entirely clear to me whether I could make something like this with it. I'm looking for example for maths and logic modules, though there may be ways to build the equivalent of those in packages that don't actually have them.

I've been meaning to pick up Bidule for quite a while, but then I can never decide between that and Mux, which also looks pretty good. Perhaps I should give Reaktor a proper run first.

[ghettosynth]

I've been meaning to pick up Bidule for quite a while, but then I can never decide between that and Mux, which also looks pretty good. Perhaps I should give Reaktor a proper run first.

Just briefly looking at the two of them, mux doesn't seem like it has the tools. Bidule might, but, my god is its user interface primitive. I don't mean the application itself, it gets the job done, I mean the interface of the devices. I've looked at bidule before, but it was some time ago and it was very unstable. It seems to be fairly stable these days and I can see some uses for it simply because it loads as a plugin, and loads plugins.

[Sendy]

I see what you mean about Bidule's GUI... The information doesn't exactly jump off of the page, does it? I had a play with it the other day, and I ended up clicking on the little box in the lower right that lets you move the view around. Eventually, as I was trying to work out how that box worked, I'd managed to scroll the entire layout off of the screen and couldn't see a way to get it back. I tried all of the menus and looked through the manual, found nothing, clicked around on the box some more to no avail, and gave up for the night.

[ghettosynth]

I see what you mean about Bidule's GUI... The information doesn't exactly jump off of the page, does it? I had a play with it the other day, and I ended up clicking on the little box in the lower right that lets you move the view around. Eventually, as I was trying to work out how that box worked, I'd managed to scroll the entire layout off of the screen and couldn't see a way to get it back. I tried all of the menus and looked through the manual, found nothing, clicked around on the box some more to no avail, and gave up for the night.

I think that I've got a basic handle on how you setup "gui's" and there are a few more options than horizontal sliders, but they are still quite clunky. The "knobs" didn't seem to rotate reliably and there is an option to associate a panel LED with a gate signal. However, you have to lay these out in a coarse grid specified in "control" units. That is, you specify that you want 16 columns of controls and then when you tell the sequencer to use vertical sliders, they will appear next to each other. There may be some way to skip positions, but, by default, it just fills up each row with controls before moving to the next, so initially, it put the two horizontal sliders on the left with their text boxes (which had expanded to about a full vertical inch), and then finished the row with the sequencer sliders.

Perhaps there's some way to specify the grid location for a gui element, but, IMO, even if there is, the UI tools in bidule are extremely limiting.

Beyond that, the sequencers in Bidule are quite crude compared with what's available in Reaktor. What you've described so far as a goal is really the manipulation of the counter that drives a sequencer, so you could even apply these techniques to advanced Reaktor sequencers such as Spiral.

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed with Bidule. As an easy to use modular plugin, I think it's quite interesting, but its value is seriously hampered by its UI limitations. Hopefully, the devs are investing some effort in that department.