Be more ambitious with your manual control. Instead of setting a tempo, create a tempo knob or manually advance the clock by tapping. Figure out ways to perform key changes smoothly, and practice listening for the right moment. Attenuate an offset, send it to a timbrel parameter and move it around while your sequences run. If you have a grid and Ansible, try earthsea (lots of secret tricks there). Perform clock div changes manually. Don’t think “I’m going from this to this,” but consider the moment of transition and how it feels. If you intuitively “get” envelopes, think of moving a fader or knob as “drawing” one. This is the kind of thing that makes “single oscillator” performances make sense – a focus on expressive gesture over crystalline composition.
I spent six months just practicing Kria + just type with some custom fader params and a quantizer, spinning every knob of JF around like a loon, changing sequences on the fly, routing voices different places, tweaking delay params, and now I just wish I had that kind of relationship with every single module. It was basically the same patch the entire time, but results ranged across nearly every genre I can think of (consider really low sines become kicks, polyrhythmic live shifts, etc).
Now I’m creating fader bank control for those aspects of Kria and using a second ansible to play rings, plaits, and mangrove via earthsea. It’s demanding and way way way out of my wheelhouse (shedding jazz guitar patterns on an isomorphic keyboard gives a powerful sense of “what the fuck am I doing and how long will this take?”) But I THINK it’s working, and there are def some “moments.”
Performance really matters, and maybe that’s just “playing the mix,” but even that is a real Discipline.
