#15

Something you can record in live and then playback would do the trick I guess; maybe the Hermod sequencer?

Or maybe even an Electribe or Elektron box that spits out Midi (not familiar with the Elektron way of working though so I may be a mile off).

I can totally understand wanting to avoid the computer/DAW based approach (there is a lot to be said for the immediacy of hardware).

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#16

For delicate melodic writing, I really like step sequencers that let you specify a duration per-step, rather than a constant pulse with rest/note triggers.

The intellijel Metropolis is the most prominent eurorack example of this style, but it only does 8-step patterns which is enough for riffs, but not great for melodic work. There’s several Buchla sequencers that can do this - the 248 and the 250 I think, but I’m not a Buchla user.

A newer module you could also look at is the Frap Tools Usta - which seems like a Buchla 250 clone in euro to me, but I haven’t gone super deep into its capabilities or workflow.

That said, it sounds like you might be past working on hardware - my oblique take would be that something like Orca, or even a tracker-style UI for detail-oriented work, might be worth considering if standard notation and piano-roll UI isn’t doing it for you.

What I’m using for this now is my OP-Z - sequences have a max of 16 steps, but you can set duration per-step, and have different step lengths and overall resolution on each track, with lots of ways to add variation and randomness.

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#17

Octatrack is pretty wonderful for sequencing. You can do micro-timing, random elements and polyrhythms.

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#18

maybe the way to go is ditch the midi grid and work in freely assignable time Intervalls. I‘ve had great fun composing small melodies with looping envelopes and 6 OP FM on the Yamaha SY77. Since there is no way to sync those EGs you‘re forced to do everything by ear, which leads to quite different results than classic grid style sequencing. In eurorack there is the Control Forge if you’re looking for precision and a lot of loopable EGs for more gestural composing. A dc-coupled sampler could also be used as an unconventional Sequencer of sorts.

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#19

I’ve had good results using Numerology…it’s deep.

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#20

FWIW, long melodic lines is what I have in mind for this sequencer design: Sequencer design for grid.

Some hardware sequencers can do anything theoretically, but their UIs are too modal, requiring a high cognitive load. A piano roll on a computer is lower cognitive load, but I don’t think it suits itself to live experimentation because it produces a lot of invalid in-between states when editing.

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#21

Hi there everyone, thanks for getting back to me on this. Really great suggestions and tbh they are all things I have tried. You see I guess I am looking for something too special to be possible in this day and age of music making products. I want to be able to recording keyboard performances of any length and edit them if needed, I want to be able to program with Electron style per-step sequencing, with the power of a Cirklon in terms of instrument numbers. Working both on or off the grid and in the end having some sequences being more like performances or musical parts on a score which I can use in musical contexts alongside standard clip/pattern type gestures and sequences. The answer thus far has been Ableton…but I would like something midi only without all the audio stuff which I don’t use and with some kind of hardware connection to be able to physically interact with the music.

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#22

You could always just learn to play a keyboard the way you like and then record the MIDI from it. It’ll take a while, but probably not as long as waiting for someone to design you a silver bullet sequencer.

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#24

Hey there yeah I have been in contact with Frap about the USTA quite a lot, because I think it looks amazing! Had a long chat to them about Rubato, fingers crossed on that one:)

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#25

I’m afraid this is a phenomenon that the more you try to get on top of (by simulating it), the more it will recede… this very “getting on top” is what chases it away.

Satie, Dane Rudhyar and Terry Jennings composed in a traditional manner – the human performer was in the loop in a traditional way. But Eno and Hiroshi Yoshimura achieved the much the same things with electronic tools and methods that were partially if not completely generative…

In search of commonalities, what I hear most is … attending to negative space, making silence and the environmental space around you a partner…

In Satie we find the ‘pause’. But the pause is not the phenomenon, it’s already a technical interpretation – precisely that which covers up the phenomenon or chases it away. What then is the phenomenon of the pause? The pause is rather that which frees the space so the ‘figure’ can resonate within it.

The silent space does not ‘ground’ the figure; it only bears it in its groundlessness.

‘Grounding’ and ‘bearing’ are opposites: the soil bears the tree, but does not ground it.

If the tree had to be grounded in the sense of “set upon logical foundations” it would be uprooted; that is, it would already cease to be as a tree.

Such is why the calculative approach in which we ponder the effect of this or that ‘timing variation’ or ‘accent’ only leads astray.

The thinking that is needed such that the space be freed for its groundlessness is rather of a meditative kind. In this the ‘pause’ is grasped more essentially.

Furthermore, the negation inherent in terms such as ‘negative space’ and ‘groundlessness’ indicates also that something has been missed or is inexpressible in language; to be understood it must be given a purely positive character, not as a ‘value’, but as something posited.

The positive character of negative space is expressed most directly in the closing statements of Kawabata’s 1968 Nobel lecture – particularly in the positive meanings given to ‘emptiness’ and ‘nothingness’ – and their contrast with ‘nihilism’ – this is perhaps what I’m after:

The following is from the biography of Myoe by his disciple Kikai:

“Saigyo frequently came and talked of poetry. His own attitude towards poetry, he said, was far from the ordinary. Cherry blossoms, the cuckoo, the moon, snow: confronted with all the manifold forms of nature, his eyes and his ears were filled with emptiness. And were not all the words that came forth true words? When he sang of the blossoms the blossoms were not on his mind, when he sang of the moon he did not think of the moon. As the occasion presented itself, as the urge arose, he wrote poetry. The red rainbow across the sky was as the sky taking on color. The white sunlight was as the sky growing bright. Yet the empty sky, by its nature, was not something to become bright. It was not something to take on color. With a spirit like the empty sky he gives color to all the manifold scenes but not a trace remained. In such poetry was the Buddha, the manifestation of the ultimate truth.”

Here we have the emptiness, the nothingness, of the Orient. My own works have been described as works of emptiness, but it is not to be taken for the nihilism of the West. The spiritual foundation would seem to be quite different. Dogen entitled his poem about the seasons, “Innate Reality”, and even as he sang of the beauty of the seasons he was deeply immersed in Zen.

[reference: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1968/kawabata/lecture/]

all this means – like Eno and Yoshimura – is to find your own way to free the space… embrace the “gridliness” of your tools while realizing you/they are not alone… for there is silence… silence is… the silent space is your partner and guide… accept its offer of friendship, as something which may bear the color of your tone… but do not crowd it out, nor attempt to make the it a ground in the sense of aesthetics, in the sense of the figure-ground relation … leave its emptiness all the more as emptiness… so that it may bear in its groundlessness…

In this, and like Eno, you will not replicate the music of Satie, but instead find your own way. And this way may be just as far from Eno’s as his was from Satie’s.

36 Likes
#26

one trick i love is playing what i intend.
if i want to compose like satie, well, satie was a genius and that is a pretty lofty goal.
but you’ll get there if you play what you want to play even if it is line by line dedicated.
an easy way in multiple software platforms is to interpret audio as polyphonic midi data.
notes, velocity, timing etc. you can send that info anywhere you want or change it.
subtlety will be programmed in by you. you will compose it.
there’s a fun max for live device that adds “human” timing to clocking.

i say start simple and learn to carve out tools that’ll be reusable for your intended goals.

try: if in ableton, simply turn off grid (is that option 4 shorcut?). timing becomes YOURS.

1 Like
#27

I wonder if anyone has tried this with the CV inputs of an Elektron Analog 4 Mk2? I’ve not seem mention of the new inputs getting much use in general, but this sounds like it could be useful.

#28

The only way I can get ‘there’ is allowing something else to control the thing - this is a relatively simple patch with a wogglebug driving a quantiser driving two sine waves. The Wogglebug clock has a bit of slop, and the notes are triggered when they cross boundaries on the quantiser, which somehow sounds quite musical (to me)

27 Likes
#29

One thought I have had is about sequencer with variable step length being clocked from an LFO with variable phase outputs. This way I could get different amount of rubato by modulating the phase and speed of the LFO (say 4 different phase outputs controlling four sequencers). Has anyone ever seen an LFO like this? I know there are things like the filter 8 which I have which will do fixed phase outputs but what about variable phase? Cheers!

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#30

Love this, really interesting patch and a brilliant idea! PS you are brilliant anyways!

#32

I’m not entirely sure if this fits the request. But I really liked the idea demonstrated here.

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#33

The first time I looked at a Satie score, I remember thinking “man, this just looks like an etude”. It didn’t look all that impressive on paper. So much of Satie “essence” for me is about the interpretation and performance of the piece (the How), rather than the notes on the page (the What).

To me, it really doesn’t matter which sequencing approach you use because as the very name implies, it is always going to be a coarse representation of what is happening in the music. There needs to be some intermediate interpretation layer that turns the notation or sequence into a sound that comes out of the speaker.

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#34

I think Batumi can do variable phase offset with CV and slider control? I’ve achieved something similar by having a single square-wave LFO with gently modulated speed, and then deriving additional streams from that wobbly “master clock”, e.g., with counters, probability, etc. Marbles is amazing for this kind of thing.

I think the difference is that my setup could not apply independent rubato to an individual voice, though?

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#35

do you have a specific synthesizer or sound module you are looking to use with the hypothetical midi/sequencing? One possible thing to try is to see what you might be able to do on the end of your synth patch programming to imitate performance dynamics - using some very slow LFOs, math functions, randoms, similar stuff assigned to things like your envelope attack time, sustain levels, decay times, other functions which might create slight timbral changes and change the feel of the timing even if it is still very on-grid, so on, might get you a bit closer to what you are looking for if your sequencing methods can’t.

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#36

Interesting stuff here, I think that using the NYSHTI I have figured out something with VCV Rack. Does anyone know how to best to integrate VCV Rack with Ableton?