Conceptually, Awake on Norns is the Deluge, where each push on the vertical row is a note that’s part of the scale.
As a concept, what’s missing is polyphony, access to notes above and below the default eight grid (which to some extent Animators solves in a fashion similar to Deluge, though it cycles rather than transports, and the octave triggers in Awake’s second track, of course), a step count beyond the sixteen and multiple patterns. Deluge allows for endless pattern length, which sounds like a shangri-la in theory but it’s in practice pretty cumbersome. If you look at patterns like bars in sheet music, and instead make it easy to move between patterns and potentially chain them together, not entirely unlike Novation’s approach with the Circuit and the Launchpad Pro MK3, it actually makes more sense to divide it like this and then instead allow for structuring them in creative ways.
I’m a classically trained pianist to begin with, before I got into this kind of music, and the pattern structure with looping and rephrasing makes total sense to me. A sonata works after the same principle. Play until this point, repeat once and after that, move to the next point. Repeat THAT section, then proceed. There’s even instructions in the note sheets on how to approach the same section in different ways, depending if you’re on the first or second loop.
So pattern structure in itself for many kinds of musicians, is a structure that just makes sense. It’s when you need to take all the pieces and make them into something bigger, where many sequencers fall short. The cry from the Elektron community after song mode into the newer devices show to some extent that structure beyond being creative within 64 steps is something almost everyone wants, even if your act is all improvisation or very defined.
So yeah, that’s what I’m aiming for. We’ll see what comes out of it.
