hello, i’ve noticed over the last 5 months since i’ve owned the model samples that the chance settings don’t seem to be very random, i.e. on 16 steps i’ll set chance to 25% and get 4 trigs in a row and then 12 non-trigs which isn’t what i’m looking for. does anyone know what algorithm is controlling the chance settings or how to improve the randomness? thanks.
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How often does that happen?
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do the first 4 trigs contain trig conditions? if so, they’ll override the chance setting
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quite often. it is not as black and white 4 on, 12 off, but i’m listening to a track i just recorded and it certainly sounds like all the chance settings (10%!) are triggering mostly consecutively (disproportionately) and then not for a long time. like i said, this is a tendency i’ve noticed over months of use.
no trig conditions (as far as i understand that term - the other options in the chance settings) but some LFO modulation.
Perhaps try extending the length of the pattern. Just theorizing honestly but 25% on 16 steps will repeat more often than 25% on 32 steps…i think… 
or i could just turn it down to ~12%. thanks for all the input. the chance settings were one of the reasons i bought the model samples and honestly i’m not too happy with how this actually works. i wonder how it compares to something like the keystep pro which also has a similar function.
Yeah I think this is just the nature of randomness, would be kind of interesting if there was a weighted random mode in the global settings which caused the odds of the next trig happening to decrease with every trig that happens in a row and increase with every missed trig. Weighted random is often what people perceive as random as it weighs its results in a more expected way.
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But that’s the nature of truly random results. Fun fact, Apple had to rework the shuffle feature on iPods because truly random results could indeed play the same song three or four times in a row. So they had to bake in extra code to select the next one from songs that hadn’t played recently and so on. They had to make it less random to appear to be truly random to their users.
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lol yeah i basically stopped using it and usually do 64.
i do not like their random algo and i haaaaate the swing. i wish there were swing modes like ableton offers. even 2-3 of them. i use it super subtly or manually shift things to sound nicely swung.
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I’m patiently waiting for them to add a 1:1 / 100% trc so that long spaces can be avoided by locking certain trigs.
It’s already been added to some of the machines (can’t remember which ones though), so I’d imagine it will get added to M:S too 
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If its anything like the DT then I agree, it feels too predictable to be random, multiple repeats followed by multiple blanks seem far more common than more random feeling spacing to the point that it is too obvious for many uses ime, which is a shame. Lower % are worse in that you get long periods of nothing then 3 together.
that’s why I never use them… it’s not you. The algo sucks.
If you have trig conditions that is the best way to get random, but yeah you have to put in some programming.
Is it random? Or just %… once you put a percentage condition in a trig it will become predictable after it loops a few time it’s not suppose to be random for ever. I thinks the idea works best when you put together a loop you like and than add a few trig conditions to different hits to add a bit of change up here and there.
I think it works more like you build a loop you know and like and than add a few conditions to mix it up and bring some unexpectedness to the rhythm you yourself wouldn’t program to keep the energy flowing while you leave producing .
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If you want to control when you feel it would be good to trigger a step, without basing it on a regular number of pattern cycles or whatever, try using the fill condition and just hold the fill button when you want to throw a trig in there. In that way it’s more likely to feel like musical randomness than mathematical randomness.
As others have said, it’s a perception-of-chance issue with the human brain. If you ask people to put a bunch of dots on a paper in a random way, they will plot a very even distribution that looks nothing like actual randomness. It’s normal to get clusters with true randomisation.
Some kind of Brownian or weighted chance condition could be interesting, where the likelihood of triggering or not is influenced by the previous chance decision.
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This thread got me comparing (in my mind’s ear) the differences between:
- one trig set to 25%
- one trig set to 1:4
Imagine a a 16 step pattern, looped 4 times, with one trig, set to either of the above conditions:
- 1:4 means the trig will only ever fire once in the cycle
- 25% means the trig may fire up to four times, and may not fire at all. This is a very different musical “story”
- firing once is in the lower end of the intensity range that 25% provides - so 25% is potentially much more “energetic” than 1:4
- 1:4 means the trig will always fire at the same point in the 4-bar cycle, which will keep the pattern sounding fixed
- 25% means the trig may fire at different moments during the 4-bar cycle, shuffling the energy/rhythm of the pattern a little (a lot if, by chance, it fires 4 times)
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Proper random has no “memory”. It doesn’t matter what happened during the previous “goes”. Yet, as humans, our perceptions exist mostly in a constant flow of interacting memory and attention.
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Their mid '00s iPod shuffle algorithm was unnerving. It seemed to play tracks that had emotional resonance with a given day’s experiences, beyond what I expected from “random”. It would link musical themes, or respond to events and moods.
(I know this is all in my head; I just enjoy talking about it as if it wasn’t.)
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It’s probably just non-weighted “regular” old random, which isn’t very interesting in my opinion. I personally rarely use stuff like that, I find it just sounds unintentional in a bad way.
Probably best to use in a more planned way like one trigger here and there is randomly triggered in a way that makes sense with everything else.
If you have four trigs in a row with random it will just sound kind of messy, so it’s definitely something that needs some careful laying out to sound good.
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