#1

Hey there. I’m seriously considering purchasing a monome, am reasonably comfortable with Max/MSP but I thought it would still be pretty neat to start things off with some goto sequencers.

Along those lines, I have a couple of quick questions regarding the two sequencers mentioned above:
1)Do either support more esoteric step lengths? Triplets or even whackier?
2)Do either support pattern lengths longer than 16 steps?

Thanks,
-Paul

#2

Mark eats is a yes on both questions

#3

Mark Eats will support longer patterns if you use automation to switch between patterns, I suppose. But the default is 16 or less. At least that’s my understanding.

#4

The two issues kinda go together right? If I set a step length of 16th triplet, then I need 24 steps per bar.

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#5

Just to be clear regarding Mark Eats Sequencer:

  • Attached is a screenshot of the step lengths you can choose per page.
  • Notes can be more than one step in length
  • Max pattern length is defined by the grid width (8 or 16)
  • As mentioned, you can sequence patterns, or parts of patterns, using automation to effectively make longer loops

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#6

Hey markeats.
Thanks for responding! Can you advise me on how easy or hard it would be to extend your sequencer to be able to handle triplets and other odd note lengths? I currently manage in Max via rewire where I run a hostphaser~ through a rate~ with precalculated ratio for the note length in question. So for like 1/16th triplets, it’s 0.167 i think.
How does the sequencer handle it’s central timing mechanism? Rewire? Midi clock?

#7

Not sure I totally follow your question as Sequencer already supports triplets as shown above?

I’m not very familiar with Max but Sequencer can use it’s own internal clock or external midi. By the way you can download the app and check out that stuff without needing a grid if you want to poke around the settings etc.

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#8

Sorry, I totally misseed the 1/24 fraction up there. Fantastic news! Thanks for the help. :slight_smile:

BTW, would you ever consider releasing the source code? What language did you write it in? ObjC? Swift?

#9

cool :slight_smile:
it’s obj-c yep. no plans to open source right now (just don’t really fancy maintaining a project like that and like to keep it focused). if there’s something specific you or someone else wants to code then let’s chat though.

#10

Cool. I’m a coder by day (mostly clojure atm) but unfortunately, I’m not very versed in Objective-C.

The main thing I was hoping to get ahold of one day is the ability to the modulate the actual step being played (ala the Rene sequencer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHf4q7pehtg ) or define a reset point wherein the sequencer would jump when it received a certain trigger. Both of these can technically be implemented using MIDI SPP’s but i have found that many machines don’t react well to the MIDI beat clock abuse. My octrack in particularly simply can’t keep up.

#11

modulate the step with what? an external controller/app?

full midi control of Sequencer is something i started work on but honestly left behind as i just felt it wasn’t going to be super useful for my workflow and making a good MIDI mapping interface is kind of a beast of a job. maybe one day.

#12

I would imagine implementing a FULL MIDI stack sounds extremely tedious. I wouldn’t touch that for the world but there is a lot of interesting shit you can do with just the Song Position Pointer(242). I have a simple max patch, for instance, which will randomly jump a pattern sequencer to say step 5 by sending out an SSP every 2 bars or whatever. Too much of this tends to make my octratrack angry though :frowning:

#13

i see what you’re getting at, although of course SPP would have some kind of global effect as it isn’t channel-specific. If it’s just a global reset you’re after then sending stop/stop/start beat clock might work fine with the current build even.

#14

Totally. It’s a ghetto jump point. A slightly better implementation might be to repurpose a control change message where the sender could specify the step # to jump to in the data bytes. A couple of hardware sequencers in euroland let you program multiple reset points which the sequencer will jump to on receipt of a trigger voltage. I kinda like the MIDI approach better though because it let’s you drive the sequencer with anything capable of sending midi(including Max)

#15

Hey Mark,
I finally took the plunge and bought a grid + ansible and am loving your sequencer. Both Sequencer and Kria make my electron gear -previously responsible for all step sequencer duties- feel cumbersome and clunky. It’s just a pleasure to use such an intuitive and fully featured piece of software.
My next goal is to attempt to completely replace my Octratrack using a combination of Kontact for sampling duties and MarkEats for sequencing. Everything is lining up well with the single limitation that because i have a 128 grid, i can only generate 8 different notes and therefore trigger only 8 different slices. Ideally, I’d be able to partition beats up into 16 or 32 slices, and it struck that one way to achieve this would be support for some kind of ‘octave’ control on the note edit page. Then I would be able to trigger 8 different notes across N octaves for a total of 8n slices.

Anyway, it’s just an idea and I was curious what you might think of it.
Thanks again for the mega-tight sequencer.

-Paul

#16

Glad to hear you’re getting so much out of it! :slight_smile:

No plans right now for an octave adjust but it is something others have mentioned…

A couple of workarounds you might consider in the mean time:

  • Use the grid in vertical mode for less steps but more notes (can be nice depending on what you’re doing)
  • Use multiple pages with differing octaves on each to control the same destination