Natural timing sequencer

#1

hi all ... im an electronic music composer from berlin, currently hiking along the french pacific coast with my dog txola ... so my replies might take a while.

ive been researching sequencing from pure data patches for a few years and made some very interesting discoveries, mainly concerning number magic and timing. you can hear some of it at soundcloud/lilakmonoke, there is extensive info in the track descriptions.

so now is the time to build my own hardware sampler/sequencer that will include all that. i might do it with the axo that i have or differently, to find that out is the puropose of this thread. here is a short description of its features,:

  • three seperate clocks with jitter, drift that are adjustably interdependent. for more on that read james holden - "on human timing" these need to be ultraprecise down to milliseconds.

  • three pattern sequencers based on numbers, not steps. primary number division, euclidian patterns etc. .. basically a number of dynamic list generators.

  • three sampler sections with loop, variable sample freq., etc. basically anything you can do with a sample but i need high quality dacs, the axo is def. too crunchy. think RME quality.

  • three double analog filters for bandwidth limiting and synth sounds. these need control voltages via envelopes etc. i could replace these with ones in my modular system or digital ones.

  • a large user interface with lots of numbers leds etc controlled via osc
    i have a complete prototype working in pure data just fine. the question is do i a) transfer the modules into the axo b) reprogram it all in c and build the machine from scratch c) others possibikities?

  • of course midi output so you can drive synths with it.

i have next to no knowledge about hardware but am willing to sink a lot if funds into it .. so this is not a low budget project. its a maximum quality personal instrument project :slight_smile:

#2

Sounds like a pretty interesting and ambitious project. I think it might be a good idea to split the sequencing and the sampler part to two axolotis to save resources. But it would still be a lot of work to realize.

Have you taken the bela plattform into consideration? Since you have everything ready in PD you could try to port it.

Another option would be a raspberry pi. Do you know Servando Barreiro's work on the audio computer? Definately worth checking out, he's using PD on a Pi in order to create his own hardware setup.

If you want rme quality it might be an idea to try to get a raspberry pi to work with the rme ucx for example, since it has a class compliant mode it might be possible. (alghough it might be a little weird to use a 1000€ audio interface on a less than 100€ computer :wink:)

Shoot me a message when you're back in berlin, we want to setup an axoloti user group here :slight_smile:

P.S. I think what you want to do should be possible but from my experience it's easier to start patching with axoloti without big expectations and freely exploring it's possibilities. That way it can be a fun process where you find nice things you didn't expect.

#3

thanks for all the good advice!

i just checked the bela platform and the low latency aspect is interesting. i couldnt find anything about the dsp power behind it but it looks low level.

i so wish somebody would come up with a high dsp diy platform for ~ 500 $ but i guess thats not geeky enough. splitting the tasks is always a possibility but seems to complicate matters to me.

i could always take a high speed linux box with an i3 and use a good audio interface and code in pure data and run it headless.

i forgot to add that the purpose of this instrument is an programmable "player" machine that can b played with in a live sdtting, either as a drummer or for rhymic sequences. if youve ever tried to play along with a drum machine you know it sucks because its lifeless and you are not :slight_smile:

so then im not sure if s linux box that can crash is a good idea for a live instrument but i guess its all up to the configuration. btw our prototype uses the non-mixer, non-timeline etc. packet which is amazing for mixing and effects.

again its all in james holdens paper, he also made a max patch for it. watch the video on this page:

https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/james-holden-human-timing/

#4

maybe the Kyma Plattform then? its a lot more expensive but seems to be pretty high quality.

Actually I find the contrast between absolutely tight machine groove and human timing really interesting. So I really enjoy playing to drum machines and finding my groove in between the straight four to the floors :wink:

But I know what I mean, when I produce I always have certain elements that I place loosely without the grid.

I dig what Holden is doing musically, so might be worth checking out, thx :slight_smile:

#5

contrast is always a nice thing but this goes much further, its about the mechanics of SYNCHING .. which is actually a universal force. planets synch, living organisms, stock markets etc.

id go so far as saying its the very essence if how we make music together, the magic of ie. led zeppelin was how they synched especially with bonham on drums.

that whole aspect is totally missing in electronic music which is not necessarily a problem but there is a whole galaxy still unexplored. thats what holden is implying and i agree ... :wink:

here is a drum track in natural timing, sort of how a good drummer would play it. drift ~1ms jitter ~1ms ... hear the difference to a daw track?

http://tindeck.com/listen/ipmiq

and here is me on guitar and tom on bass trying to sych with that "drummer" for the first time. we speed up on double time but the dude doesnt listen to us :slight_smile: still sounds like a really good drummer to me ...

http://tindeck.com/listen/frhvj

#6

I don't know if you would totally agree with you. In the early days of electronic music when syncing was less reliably it was always neccessary to balance out all the little timing mistakes that your machines would made.
That is not neccessarily the syncing interaction musicians have between each other but it is still dealing with little imperfections and a constant shifting of microtiming.

It's just in these days that syncing mechanisms got more and more perfect and with digital recording music more and more grid based that I agree with you (and Holden)
Another good example is here the world of djing where in the good old days people where mixing with records, an anolog imperfect medium that would not keep its speed perfectly. Furthermore djs of these times where much more likely to mix music that was not recorded with a grid. So again here is some floating component and constant interaction between two (or more) musical timing interpretations,

On the other hand when I listen to the music of FlyLo or Stimming these days I can clearly sense this free floating human timing. Of course this a little bit the interaction between musician and recording as described in the article and there is a lot of copy/paste involved. On the other hand good producers always kind of balance out the microtiming of a composition of a whole wich when you look it at a macroscale will give similiar results as two more musicians playing together.

I personally really like to adjust the microtiming of elements I use in my tracks and have some really loosley timed and some rigidly following the grid. That might also involve chaning the timing of one element when the other enters or vice versa. Further more if you tweak parameters like envelopes you can drastically change how you perceive an element in the groove.

I'm also bit doubtful that sync engines like ableton link will make jamming and music better as it even enhances some kind of none awareness of microtiming and shifting grooves. So eventually I'm with you but I think creating a natural timing sequencer is not the only ways to get natural timing. But its an awesome idea to make timing more bidirectional as in the classical sense. Anyways getting a bit late here, shoot me a pm when youre back in Berlin :slight_smile:

#7

i totally dig microtiming management aesthetics!

a friend of mine is an young and coming berlin detroit techno dj and 90% of his tracks are the 909 ... which has the "worst" clock of all roland drum machine. jitter around 5 ms and drifts like crazy, synch that with ableton and its all over the place.

but thats exactly why the the 909 has defined classic techno, its alive, aggressive and he calls it "the stallion" .. check him out soundcloud.com/henningbaer

here is another of my favourite man against machine: in this case mc-909 vs. tascam portastudio 4track = container live

https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=ePRP7GXzqyI&list=FLilKl9B0nLQKA3sYblyy7wQ

#8

so here is an example of how this drifting timing sequencer works and sounds. this is the drum track for our experimental live funk band.

as you can see in the pattern sequencer its just a bunch of simple patterns that overlap in simple and complex whole number relationships and create grooves that are never random or repetitive but constantly evolving.

the main thing about this track is the microtiming. first of all the clock speed always drifts slightly like real drummers or analog clock circuits do, here roughly 0.5 milliseconds per 16th. with upper and lower limits and an imprecision of around 2 ms. these values are roughly derived from what real drummers do.

second, the groove is asymmetrical with every 16th in the first and third beat being 5ms longer than in the second and fourth. this results in a hopping beat where every bassdrum seems to be too late or every snare too early, kind of a heavy swing funk beat = hip hop beat. all the sounds are from a novation drumstation btw.

so what we have here is a mechnical drum machine that sounds like a funk drummer that plays polyrhythmical patterns. pretty interesting in my book!

here is the link to the patch in pure data:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1beo8lTIeKlcUlrMmlQbF84M2c