[PD] A growing idea

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Fri Nov 19 10:45:25 CET 2004


Hallo,
 <tboulanger at voila.fr> hat gesagt: //  <tboulanger at voila.fr> wrote:

> Hmmm, I've planned to do a kind of patch which would help me creating some rythmic patterns.
> The core : a sample in a buffer (for instance a drum).
> The parameters : tempo and a "groove template" say Random1
> If I press a key on my keyboard, the event is first transmitted to a select object which outputs a bang
> related to the Random1 "groove template". This triggers a subpatch (a random sequence that duplicates the bang
> at different times) so that the sample is played at different times.
> In the mean time, some functions will change continually the behaviour of an FX rack (for instance lp filters etc etc) to transform what is sent out by my sampler.
> Using it I could have some interesting rythmic patterns.
> Has anyone already tried to make this kind of thing work ? 

I think, what you describe is the step sequencer, which has been
implemented in various forms of hard- and software. In Pd, the good
thing is, that "everything is a float", so if you write one
stepsequencer originally intended to sequence notes, you can sequence
filter settings as well as you can sequence other sequencers or random
note ranges etc. 

I created several rather generic step sequencers as part of my
RRADical abstraction collection, which grew out of my sseq-collection.

Some issues I faced: You will want to save state like rhythmic
patterns etc. Everone uses table objects for this first (there is a
nice example in Miller's docs), and this it's a good exercise to do
this as well as to use textfile and qlist. However IMO both are not
flexible enough. "pool" is a popular external as alternative, as are
coll and msgfile, but PDContainers rul3z m0st for (step) sequencing. I
need to find a bridge between both.

Second: You might find yourself in the need to do a lot of connections
between [select], [f], [route], [tgl] and similar objects. If you do,
learn Pd's internal message syntax. 

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__




More information about the Pd-list mailing list