Spent the afternoon playing with Reactable again today. It really is starting to grow on me. It's still frustratingly limited in some areas, but there are still lots of fun little functions to try out.
One of the things I was quite impressed by was the scale quantise. Effectively, you select the scale and key you want, and all notes will be transposed to fit with in that scale, pretty neat. A particularly easy way to make use of this function is by using the randomising on the sequencers. You can set a rhythm and the sequencer will spit out random notes on the pattern you entered. When you combine these two little functions it can get pretty interesting.
The breaks are some I loaded in from my computer, running together into a compressor, both the bass an melody oscillators are ran from random quantised patterns from the sequencers, then through a low pass filter and reverb. I had the window for the melody sequencers rate, and was just switching between a couple different tempos.
So, OK, its not exactly the most inspired piece of music you ever heard, but still pretty neat for a little app. Anyone with an Ipad or Iphone who hasn't tried this out yet, give it a go, its awesome!!
Something that has always interested me is generative music, but I've never really tried to make anything like that so I thought I'd give it a bash.
What I found hardest was finding the balance of input. As in how much is the patch doing completely autonomously, and how much is from my suggestion.
I started off by building a fairly simple sample based drum machine, which I split into 3 parts. One sequencer lane for the kick, one for snare, and a third for percussion noises. Next I spent a couple hours making short snappy drum sounds with an SH101. Made about 50 in total, I also made one straight up kick drum sound, and one snare sound.
I loaded the kick and snare into their own sample modules, and the remaining samples all got loaded into one sample module. I also built a automation channel for sample selection. This meant that I could sequence a solid Kick Snare pattern and allow the percussion to wander around.
Next I made a couple of randomising LFO's which sync to the main clock. One of these was assigned to percussion sample selection, the other to percussion sample pitch.
Finally I built a comb filter and ran the entire drum mix through it. I assigned another Tempo synced LFO to control the pitch of the comb filtering. Put the output through a heavy compressor, and that's about it for the drums.
This was sounding pretty cool, but needed something more to make it a bit more musical.
I loaded up an old FM synth I built a while ago, and sent the trigger from the snare pattern into the gate of the synth. Then another random LFO to control the FM interval. Finally I built a pretty complex macro for controlling the pitch of the notes played based on a few other things going on in the patch. Ran this through the compressor too, which gave quite a nice side chain style pumping.
Lastly, I brought up the recorder box, hit record and then pressed play, this is what came out.
Pretty cool I think. Reminds me quite a bit of Autechre, although a long way from the complexities they have in their music. Some similarity for sure though. I do really like its completely emotionless mechanical quality, definitely something I couldn't have written if I had tried, but I do feel that I still could have had less involvement in the composition. Certainly going to give this another try!
