I've been thinking about getting my friends into synths & music hardware, and I'm trying to come up with something that even someone with no experience on music making would have so much fun tweaking and making sounds from it.
This might not be a good place to ask (since a lot of us have some experience with sound design or synth tweaking), but what would a non-producer or non-musician want to play with?
Obviously I'm going to turn some of the ideas into an Axoloti patch.
If you’re looking for inspiration, I can think of no better example than Korg’s Kaossilator. Notes are locked to a (selectable) scale and tempo. It can play leads, pads, bass lines and drums.
I've been thinking about making basically a music toy. It would use the adafruit 4 x 4 jelly button grid and 6 knobs.
It's just an idea though so I have nothing else to offer, sadly.
I've been making several modules lately that can take care of musical progressions.
For example, key-progression is really easy if you follow a tonnetz diagram, which could be controlled by a XY-controller to draw the movement through the keys.
For drums you could use a sequencer that features a list of different variations on several genres where people could select from. As for the sounds of the drums, I've made several drum-modules that can be changed through randomisation, so people can just hit random until they got a sound they like. Same more or less goes for all the other sounds (I've got quite some modules featuring a randomisation control).
That said, I still want to make a synth that could be controlled by using a row of knobs that control "feelings', like smiley's going from sad to happy, angry to nice, evil to good, tired to energetic etc. Then use machine learning to teach the machine what these parameters should be controlling in which way. This way maybe even a severely handicapped person might be able to create music to his or her taste. Only problem is... I don't know how to do the machine-learning part yet..
This post made me remember this extremely cool video I once found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7YM7JI3aRc
If you’re looking for inspiration, I can think of no better example than Korg’s Kaossilator.
Seconded! The Kaos Pad mini and the Kaossilator mini are instant fun and evry easy to handle!