Machinedrum Trig Conditions? Generative Sequencing via MIDI Loopback
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- Опубліковано 8 лис 2018
- A big advantage of the Machinedrum over its modern counterpart the Analog Rytm is that it is a competent MIDI sequencer. Basic in implementation but complex and flexible in use, there are a variety of ways to approach MIDI sequencing with the Machinedrum that take things to a very modular place, with the ability to produce and generate rhythms and melodies through both deterministic and probabilistic modulation networks and patterns. This video details an approach utilizing a MIDI machine modulated via LFOs through the use of a CTR-8P machine. By using the Map Editor to map particular MIDI notes to instruments in combination with careful adjustment of the range of generative MIDI output we can produce and manipulate a wide variety of patterns using very simple inputs. Implementation of a basic use-case is thoroughly covered, with many details, quirks, and possibilities of this approach discussed.
the use of probabilistic triggering techniques is also useful and very interesting in a real-time sampling and re-sampling context - • Machinedrum UW: Probab...
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tried this to the letter a bunch of times. I can get 16/M4 to trigger the BD no problem. but when I need to get the CTR-8P machine to change the 16's Note, nothing happens. however I have a SPS-1 and you're on a UW+, so maybe there are some midi routing differences.
bummer! :( specifically what Machinedrum model is it? is mk2 or mk1? I have been very curious if this would work on older units, thank you very much for reporting back! hopefully other users with mk1 or non-UW MDs will chime in at some point
@@maxmarco its a mk1 unit, earliest of the earliest. I cant seem to get any LFO to modulate the parameters of the 16/M4 Midi machine. I get the logic of what you're trying to do, and its a good exploit, but for whatever reason it doesn't seem to want to animate those parameters. I might try messing with some of the Global settings, it may be that it needs to receive or transmit control data for this to work?
I don't think control send/receive would affect anything, but it's possible mk1 has some weird quirks. I guess until proven otherwise I have to assume this won't work for mk1 units, and I was quite hopeful that it would :(
edit: the CTR-8P to modulate MIDI machines is not very well-known - maybe in part because it was only possible on later units? maybe I will look for MD version changelog sometime, I think it's floating around out there somewhere
@@maxmarco been reading more about this here: www.elektronauts.com/t/lfo-note-doesnt-work/5860/23 , and it does seem to be a known bug. even using the CTRL-8 machine doesn't allow me to change the midi note via LFO, so I think it maybe have either been an oversight or just plain something they weren't anticipating in 2001. subsequent OS revisions fixed this I guess.
thanks for doing some digging! really appreciate it, very unfortunate - I do remember seeing a changelog/bugfix sheet for MD one time with various firmware revisions but no idea how I'd find that now
I hope you're doing well max. Know that your videos have inspired loads, particularly in the octatrack and machinedrum realm.
Absolutely fantastic!! Impressive and inspiring all at once. 👍🏽
I can't believe how powerful the MD is. I almost feel I don't deserve mine. #imnotworthy Thanks for the vid!!
I don't think the MD cares how it is used as long as it is being used joyfully :D
Wooow...I have to watch it several times to completely understand what's going on and why...such a great work of mind and sound you made! Thanks! I'll try it!
hey thanks much!! It has some quirks and limitations but is a ton of fun! would have liked to spend more time on the musical examples but they seemed sufficient and I wanted to get the idea out there - sorry some of the captions flicker a bit, need to be more careful in the future about quality assurance of my video renders! I'm sure I'll eventually make a follow-up though as I have a number of ideas I want to try out when I have the chance - seems to work best if I try to make a full track with weird new techniques like these before I make an info vid on them, have to let the ideas and possibilities marinate for a while to achieve best flavor :)
seems like you are artificially constraining your imagination by adopting certain preconceptions; these techniques can be used for any style of music, and can be easily used in ways that are entirely subliminal, unlike my demos here which purposefully highlight 'how the sausage is made', so to speak
This is some mind blowing stuff! I'm going to have to watch this a few times. Haha!
I've watched this vid so many times. I've had my mk2 non uw for a month now. I'm ready to try this madness later today. Thanks for all your vids. I have found them truly inspiring.... If a little terrifying! Until now. 😁 ♥ 🎶 🎹 🥁
Thanks max! This is so cool that you put MD videos this time. I have a feeling that electronic instruments develpoment is going to come a full circle and now digital machines will arise one again. It sounds cool!
thank you! MD is too cool not to make videos for it :) :) :) Mostly I just really like very modular designs, to get more open-ended than Machinedrum or Octatrack you have to use modular hardware or software - I actually had quite a bit of modular gear before I ever bought an OT and then eventually an MD as well :D
You just costed me a lot of money! Let's hope the machinedrum will be all the fun it promises to be.
hah! excellent! need to get all the MDs off the market to force Elektron to satisfy the demand for a mk3 :D
Thank you for this. Very inspiring and informative
MAx iv had my machinedrum uw+ since it came out and ive never seen this in depth sh1t ! wowza happy to learn this even if it 15 years later :) I have to watch it a few time to figure this out
Cool, never thought of this, really creative!
thank you! it is particularly interesting to me that I got this idea from a technique I developed for OT to fake conditional triggers using slices before conditional trigs were added to OT
Thanks for the great video. I don't own a machinedrum yet but have an appointment to get one. I'm familiar with newer elektron boxes but totally fail to follow you on this video. I think I need to know the MD and its menus a little more. Intellectually, I find it hard to understand. But I'm pretty new to all this (less than a year), so I'll give myself time ;)
thanks for sharing love it !
Really Nice!
My goodness this is deep!
the glitching/flamming is a little annoying sometimes but it's far too fun of a technique to ignore!
Seriously? WTF I had the bloody machine for almost a decade, new era for the old Elektron lady
Very clever programming.
thank you! it's a bit of a hack, but an awfully fun one!
awesome
This video shows a pretty hilarious quirk of the Machinedrum MIDI implementation - I don't mention it in the video or the captions, and the way I set up my basic use-case neatly avoids me even needing to mention it! Haha! Did anyone pick up on it?
Pleeeease, enlighten us as to what this easter egg is!! :D
this is amazing **turns on machinedrum
Awesome work ! Shame the same possibilities don’t exist with the Monomachine :-(
thanks a lot! due to my extreme love of the Machinedrum I actually got a Monomachine a couple weeks ago - I haven't dug that much into it, but I'm sure there are lots of related techniques that are possible, and ways to replicate some of this behavior. Even if Monomachine had a map editor that allowed you to map notes to trigger single tracks (Monomachine map editor is for pattern triggering only, correct?), it only has 6 machine slots, so it wouldn't be able to take advantage of this particular technique nearly as well as Machinedrum.
As I'm writing this and thinking about it more, it's possible with clever use of patterns you could replicate this technique, but I'm not sure it'd be worth it, given the extra complexity and the other potential options on the Monomachine for producing/emulating this type of behavior. Perhaps something to research sometime in the future when I feel like doing something unnecessarily complicated just because I can! xD
Love this! Do you recommend getting the md mkii (without uw) or getting the uw version?
thank you! it mainly depends whether you like the sound of the sampling engine or not - it's very distinctive, and in terms of available storage and sampling time (very meager) it's very much like an old-school sampler, although the operation is basically a primitive Octatrack. Personally I love the UW, but I can see some not caring for it, but I feel it massively increases the already vast possibilities of the MD, and makes using it for certain tasks much easier. 'Regular' Machinedrum is still very awesome though, and I can see some users (and I have read their posts on Elektronauts) opting for regular MD to pair it with an Octatrack to take care of the sampling aspects
@@maxmarco makes sense! i love the UW aspects giving it more possibilities. Is the MIDI feature you are working with here available in the MD mkII as well?
yup! this video doesn't use any sampling features or features specific to the UW, and even the earliest Machinedrums could be MIDI sequencers - although if you look in the comments here someone reported in about how mk1 units can't do what I show in this video, due to what is apparently a bug they fixed in later firmware
February 26th 😊
spectacular shit.
thank you! is a bit screwy but fun toolbox to work with - I need to circle back sometime and use these techniques to actually make some tracks, I always discover the most useful stuff that way
I have another question to you mr marco :
can you give us an explaination why the SIN machine of the machine drum sounds like no other SIN wave ? I mean , it seems like like machine drum SINE sounds so different than another , right ? why ?
I can only speculate really, but if there's one thing I've learned since getting into synths is that it seems no waveforms are ever created equal, except inside of mathematics and physics textbooks xD
2:37 - props on callin' out the flamz
it's kind of cool how they are rather inconsistent due to MIDI latency/jitter, makes things a bit more 'lively' in a way - but they're very annoying if that's not what you're looking for :D
@@maxmarco Have you done any audio loopback from a given output port into an input port - to which the audio-in is triggering an instrument?
I had the MD's inputs fed from the aux send on my mixing board
and had the audio-in setup to trigger a hi-hat for example.
can get flutters like this:
ua-cam.com/video/sGXJMrvMGUM/v-deo.html
very cool idea for getting the Machinedrum out of its box! someone else a while back also suggested using audio from OT to send triggers to MD, but I don't think self-triggering crossed my mind - definitely something I need to try out! Interesting thread regarding MD got unearthed the other day - you might find it helpful if you haven't seen it already www.elektronauts.com/t/confirmed-machinedrum-midi-in-phase-problem/28816/18
What would be your settings for randomly midi controlling a mute state of a track ? Can,t succeed to achieve this !
that's an interesting idea, I could see there being some potential problems executing it though; will have sit down and spend some time to see what's possible
have tried the tip . works really nice . BUT :
suppose I want to go further . If I have set the midi channels 9-12 ( like you ) , tracks 1 to 4 are receive channel 9 and tracks 5 to 8 are receiving channel 10 right ? But If I am setting another midi track to channel in order to control treacks 5 to 8 , this channel is triggering tracks 1 to 4 , whereas , these track 1 to 4 are logically receiving only the channel 9 . So why this midi channel 10 is triggering the tracks 1 to 4 instead of 5 to 8 ? any idea ?
since I made this video I have gained some additional understanding of the Machinedrum MIDI implementation (which is a bit convoluted). So the first thing is that MIDI notes set in the map editor to trigger certain instruments tracks can be received on ANY of the base channels - so if your base channels are 1-4 and you have Track 1 mapped to be triggered by MIDI note C-2 then a C-2 sent on any of the MIDI channels 1-4 will trigger Track 1. So you can't separate these MIDI note streams by channel when they go back in, even though it seems like you could. So that's why in my example in this video with 2 midi generators, one of them is using the bottom of the range, and the other is using the top of the MIDI note range, so they don't overlap in the note ranges they produce. if you're careful about setting it up you could use more than 2 random MIDI generators, but 2 of them mapped to opposite extremes of the MIDI note range is the easiest thing to do without getting too much of a headache, if that makes sense :D
edit to add: it seems to me the base channel setting is primarily about how the tracks will respond to incoming CC messages
max marco thank you ! i get it . did you experiment by using midi CC ? I am hurry to see your next machinedrum videos .
I had the idea about selling it , few months ago , but as the Octatrack , what an incredible machine , I will keep it forever .
definitely a true hardware instrument . thank you for opening all these doors for electronic music exploration
awesome! :) I still have yet to try out CC messages with loopback very much - it is definitely something very powerful but also very confusing and will take some thought to see the different ways it can be useful or interesting. I'm most interested in using CC sequencing/modulation to interact with performance gestures, kit re-loads, and classic/extended switch - but I am currently staying focused on learning more about the finer points of RAM machine usage for my next MD video. I often find I make the best info video if I use new techniques to make new pieces of music first, and I definitely will have to do that with CC feedback before attempting to make an info video on it, otherwise my info video probably won't be very good!
I'll probably keep my MD even if they release a mk3 (which I would most likely buy also of course). There's definitely some special sauce in this box! :)
:-O Wow
it's funny, I was realizing that I built these exact same types of probabilistic/generative MIDI sequencers inside of Ableton many years ago... only to realize this year that I could have done the exact same things with a piece of hardware from 2001... hahaha!
Drop
(M)-di.
nevertheless , I did not understand the purpose of enabling / desabling local control . when I set to off , the midi machine does not its job anymore : the audio machine is not playing .....
yes! this is a tricky aspect - I may revisit this in the future to explain via video better (when I made the video my understanding was a bit fuzzy also) but let me try to briefly describe what I have learned
so basically, if you have a track mapped to MIDI note, it will also SEND that MIDI note if it has track trigs - when you loop back with MIDI you then end up with a double/multi-hit flam effect as the internal track trig triggers the sound, then the MIDI flys out the MIDI cable and loops back in some milliseconds later, causing another trigger of the same instrument. Depending on the sound being triggered this will be more or less noticeable. If you turn off Local Control, this disables the the track's trigs from triggering the instrument directly, but the MIDI from the track trigs still goes out and back in to trigger the instrument. However, if you have other instrument tracks that are not mapped to MIDI notes and you turn Local Control off they will no longer be able to trigger themselves, since they aren't mapped to any MIDI notes and their internal sequencer is basically disconnected. So if you want to completely avoid these types of flams on all tracks, while simultaneously using random MIDI generator(s) and internal track trigs, it will take some careful setup where you make sure tracks feed their own MIDI notes back to themselves
so to do it 'cleanly' I would recommend using at most 2 random MIDI generators, one mapped to top of range, one mapped to bottom. Then make sure the LFO depths on those MIDI generators stay within certain ranges to limit the MIDI notes they spit out, and map the tracks you don't want to trigger with the MIDI generators to notes in the middle of the range so there are no overlaps. In my examples in the video I'm doing it pretty 'dirty' - whether or not the 'dirty' results with flamming are acceptable is pretty contextual for me, and the flamming is actually kind of interesting sometimes
this kind of thing is actually a lot cooler to me in some ways than typical conditional trig stuff, since the MIDI generators can trigger multiple instruments - even just 1 MIDI generator can do a ton of 'heavy lifting'
frustrating that using the machine like this, can't sync to other devices - otherwise love it!
thank you! what other devices are you trying to use with MD? a bit of MIDI merge and/or thru boxes might have you covered for completing a MIDI feedback loop to the MD - will take a bit of careful configuration to make sure everything would play nice depending on what you're trying to do though.
If you are using external sequencers with MD this method is possibly superfluous and not necessary - other than maybe to implement for fun or education - but that would depend a lot on your external sequencer
oh! and also don't forget you can still use MD as analog trigger source to sync analog and modular gear using GND-IM machines routed to individual outputs
@@maxmarco ok will try a MIDI Thru box to see if this will allow MIDI sync with other devices
if you are ok with MD as master clock you should be able to have MD on internal clock, sends clock, but doesn't receive clock - haven't tried for myself though! maybe some other configs would work also
@@Honeysmack you can. i do it thru Logic. that way everything syncs, you can filter MIDI messages in Logic, and control the MD with its own MIDI params at the same time.
Your videos are insanely instructional , congratulations . Your voice kinda doesn’t match your hands ...how old are you
hey thanks a lot! I'm in my early 30s and need to take better care of my hands xD
max marco all good, you sound much older than your hands look. Very good quality videos, thanks for sharing
hah! I got it backwards then! and here I was thinking I had a youthful voice! :D