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Looper's Delight
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>>Well, imagine you have all these step sequencer modules that keep looping riffs, melodies, chords or whatever. Then you can assign knobs to adjust each sequencers number of steps. Imagine running three patterns in a cool complimentary three part groove. All three runs by 16 steps, smoothing in very well as 4/4 measure music. Now twist a knob to shorten one of them to 15 steps. This means for each loop one of the "instruments" will speed up on 16th note related to the other two instruments. To go havoc with this technique and still not loosing the downbeat feel you may set a "Hard Sync" value. If you set one sequencer module to "Hard Sync = 32" it means that this pattern will get retriggered at the original down-beat every 32d step. You may eventually assign a second button to "Tempo Division", which means that this particular sequencer will run faster or slower, compared to the others, according to the Tempo Division value (but always "brought home" by the eventual Hard Sync setting). Expand this into 128th note values and assign a fourth sequencer module (or an LFO) to modulate the instrument sequencer's Tempo Division value according to continuous sweeps, and you might take off into Squarepusher land.<< per, you really need to get y'rself a sequentix p3 midi sequencer. I have been using one of mine as a polyphonic midi looper. http://www.sequentix.com/ colin doesn't make or supply the thing any more, because he is working on the p4- the result of a healthy forum & many keen users. they do turn up for sale from time to time though. obviously, it will hard-quantize the note on/offs to whatever the resolution of the pattern is, but one has the option of switching the midi-through on & off in record mode, so that one's unquantized keyboard riffing (or, in my case, banging around on a peavey midibase) can go straight through to the sampler/module the first time it's played, then the sequencer repeats it quantized until/unless you play something else & over-write the pattern with new notes. the 8 "parts" can all be on different midi channels or all on the same channel or anything in between. they can run at different tempi-divisions, be different lengths, run in any number of directions including a variety of random, brownian &c. they can be made to interact, so that one track will poach notes from other tracks...... almost all of these parameters can be altered by step-events, by manual manipulation, by accumulators that do different things depending how "old" the sequences are, & all in real-time while the thing is running. I'm using, as I mentioned earlier, my repeater as the master clock. my challenge is to keep the sequences bouncing nicely along with a syncopated echo but in fact, my drummer is the master clock & the repeater should follow him really. he doesn't/won't play the sort of drum patterns that would lend themselves to beat-extraction, either by the repeater's beat detector or by anything else I can think of, hence my whacking the tap-tempo button & looking for a way to do this with a speed-up/slow-down pedal. d.