Very specific feature request concerning pattern structure

windspirit

So I love using my LXR to make dance music and it really has some great sounds for this, but i find that I almost never use the sub-steps on the sequencer for this kind of music.  I personally would find it a lot more useful to have 8 times as many patterns and no substeps, just keeping to the simple 16 step sequencer, but having a more intuitive pattern chaining scheme to allow for long rhythmic cycles that last for 4 or even 16 bars.  My suggestion goes like this:

Get rid of substeps and use the same amount of memory to have 8 banks of 8 patterns

Choose pattern chaining by pushing "select" and then pressing the patterns in order to play, so pressing select and then pressing pattern buttons " 1 1 2 3 1 1 3 4 1 1 1 8 2 2 6 7 " would play the patterns in this order.  Maybe include an option to toggle pattern chaining so that you can loop a single pattern for awhile and then go back to the original chain.

I would also LOVE a feature that allowed you to press 2 steps and the sequencer would loop between those steps, sort of like how the korg volca beats does it, except that after you release the steps the drum machine would go back to the original step in the cycle that it would have done if playing unlooped.  By pressing a different button you could "lock" this loop and effectively turn a 16 step sequence into a bunch of smaller sequences and use the sequence as a palette while jumping around inside of it to generate beat variations of the original.  I am thinking of something like the zaquencer's length and offset controls but more immediate, ie just press the start and end steps that you want to play.

I feel like this feature request deserved its own topic because it is something that I have been thinking about for awhile and also because it is such a drastic change from the original sequencer right now.  For that reason I think that it might do well as an "alternate firmware" or even a different mode in the normal firmware.

I have planned on coding this myself for awhile but with a me moving cities and also starting a production run of Eurorack modules I do not think that I will have time to do this modification for a few months.  Therefore I figured that I would post it here in case anyone else decided to make this happen before i can get to it.

Thoughts?

brendanclarke

You may want to look into my firmware. I've added the option to 'scale' each pattern to 2, 4, ... 128 bars by reducing the resolution of the sub steps. I find 8 bars the most useful since each sub-step becomes a 16th note. It's a bit of a pain to enter manual automation on all those sub-steps, but gives a lot more options. scaling is per-track so you can have some voices looping on 1 bar and some on 8 bars, etc. It's also per sub-pattern (this is really important to keep in mind because it gets super confusing if you're working with multiple sub-patterns since this parameter, like track length, is edited from the voice menus, but is stored in the pattern data).

I'm all about more performance options, and would like to implement a looper, much like you describe, at some point.

the whole hazarai is a good read in http://www.brendanclarke.com/files/LXR

windspirit

Hmm interesting.  Does this mean that the patterns no longer change together for all of the drum voices?

brendanclarke

they do, but if you want to change the pattern of a single voice, you can fudge it by using the track copy function, you just have to turn off the 'follow' global option that locks the viewed pattern to the playing pattern. track copy can then be done with a single track from the viewed pattern into the playing one.