I’ve been playing with Koala on iOS, and the live push-button effects page has reminded me how much I value one thing on all hardware and software tools: having buttons that suddenly change the sound completely, which you can play rhythmically, spontaneously, and interactively.
Now I’m wondering whether there are other machines that can do this that I’ve missed? I’d love to hear suggestions.
From my own kit I can list this lot:
Octatrack of course, because you can bang a scene on and off, or crossfade it. (This is amazing and almost makes me forgive what a massive pain in the arse it undeniably is to use).
Pocket Operators, their live effects are glorious for it.
The OPZ which is brilliant once you get your head around the Performance Effects track.
MC101 (and MC707) with the Scatter effects buttons.
I guess I could include the Kaoss pad and all its descendants, but you can only really switch a single effect in and out with that. The thing I love about all the devices I’ve listed above is that you can sit at them, with a bunch of buttons before you like a huge palette, and each one can instantly impose (and then instantly remove) a wildly different effect: distortion, stutter, a ludicrous amount of reverb, gate, and so on. It makes for glorious live interactive playing, and it’s also really interesting because the impact of the same effects on different patterns and sounds can be wildly different.
There must be other devices that can do this which I’m missing? I can’t work out if the digitakt does it, at a lazy meander through the manual and youtube: I think you can just turn knobs to increasingly apply some change or another to all the samples/tracks in a pattern, and then suddenly switch it off by reverting to saved pattern, and I guess you could save the permuted pattern, but it’s not the same thing as being able to spontaneously wallop on a wildly different sound character. I think RYTM can maybe do something like it? But there must be more!
I believe the Polyend Play & Tracker have pretty glorious performance effects abilities from what I have seen in demos. Erica Synths LXR-02 is another one that seems like it would be great for performance effects as well. Another idea is to get some kind of effects box or performance mixer that could do things like this to each element of your mix, like the Roland MX-1 or some kind of Looper like the RC-505 MKII or RMX-1000/RMX-500. Really interested to see what others suggest here.
Drambo on iOS can do this in many different ways. You can create groups of FX chain modules and mute in and out of them. Probably the best playground for this type of thing.
Ctrl All on DT, DN and ST can do this as well.
Not just a “one knob change it all” but close.
DN through MW, PB, AT and BC can drastically change the sound.
A4 performantes as well.
A bit out there but the Nord Modular G2 can, since each patch has 8 variation modes that can be switched via midi CC. You can also use the built-in patch mutator in the software editor to both generate random parameters, or mutate/cross mix other variations for new ones.
Since you can also sent out midi CC values as a patch, you can also effectively do this to any other device that can be edited via Midi CC.
Hmm. Would OP be referring to a drastic change implemented at signal chain level, at FX level, using modulation, or it does not matter, i.e. just as long the output becomes wildly different?
Off the hat, I could think of Toraiz SP-16 with that touch strip.
To achieve a more impactful change, other considerations could involve: ribbon controllers, D-beams, gesture controllers, macros (one knob affecting multiple things to modulate), send vs insert effects (on EQ, Compression, Gate, Reverb, Delay, Echo and Beat Effects - you name it), changing/splicing patches/other parameters on a per step, resampling and using a different synthesis method altogether, etc.
I’ve really been hoping that the DT might suddenly be able to do what I’m aiming at here with its CTRL-All function but it seems that is built around the notion of gradually building up changes, and suddenly switching them off, as in this video below. I want to be able to suddenly switch them on and off. I suppose I could save the permuted pattern as a separate one and switch back and forth but its less spontaneous (and I don’t know how fast the switching would be?).
I have a little DT gear lust mainly because (forgive the sacrilege) I can use the OT but I do find it to be a bit of an ordeal. E.g. I love grabbing one shots and using them, in OT I have to remember to manually save each one otherwise they disappear forever at power off or re-record. And the best way to work with lots of one shots in OT is with chains, but you have to pre-prepare those off-line in octachainer or similar. DT feels like easy UX paradise but I’m sure it has its own frustrations too!
I absolutely love Drambo but I’m especially looking for hardware boxes, each mode of working has its own merits but I find with apps requiring manual assignment of hardware controllers to each element, and lots of plugging in of controllers to your phone/tablet that’s often out travelling in your pocket, its never really a stable hardware UI unless you’re very disciplined!
Actually I think the Torso T1 sequencer might be an option the more I think about it.
It’d be a little bit of setup, but even without using the sequencer, you could potentially have 16 tracks with 12 CCs each, on any midi channel you’d like that you could either program at a specific value, modulate via a repeating random sequence, or per step. Within that are up to 16 bars per track that could all have different values, if you’d like.
You can have as many steps per track as you’d like, and a wide range of clock divisions.
That’s just one Pattern, and you can have up to 16 per Bank, of which there are 16 Banks.
Setting up the CC numbers are a bit of a pain in the ass, but I mean, you get a lot to work with…
I’m really interested by the idea of using an external box to impose this kind of functionality on a box like Digitakt by sending CCs/NRPNs/whatever to suddenly trigger effects on and off, params up and down etc. There are some youtube videos of people doing this with midi loopback as a hack. I’m trying to avoid that kind of palaver and find devices that just do the trick out of the box, but it’s definitely an interesting option.
Polyend Tracker performance mode is my favorite for this, because you can basically set up your own FX presets, and also pick which tracks it will affect. It is fun to do live jams on.
The Circuit Rhythm can do this in a few of different ways.
First, there are the grid fx. These are master fx that can be triggered by the pads on the grid fx page. The way that they work is that you’ve got 7 effects–reverse, phaser, beat repeat, auto filter, vinyl, bit crush, and gate. And you’ve got 16 spaces to set up presets. You can trigger all 7 at once if you want. You just can’t trigger two presets for the same effect at once.
Second, you can do direct jumping between projects. So you can have a few versions of the same project with different settings and bounce back and forth between them. This has its issues though. Sometimes you can hear a quick gap in the audio between projects. And if you’ve got different reverb and delay settings you can get a pretty wild fx tail.
The way that the reverb and delay work kind of allow for this too since they work off a preset system. Personally, I don’t like this aspect of it that much because you can’t edit those presets even in the software companion. (Though you can adjust them with an external controller.) But it’s worth mentioning. It’s a thing you can do.
You can also direct jump between patterns. And since you can do parameter locks and lock samples to steps, you can get some pretty big variations.
And even though it’s not an immediate change, you can cue scenes from the same page where you’ve got your track mutes. You do that by pressing pads. And it’s really easy to jump back and forth between all the pages.
I think it’s worth looking into.
And yeah, the Digitakt loopback thing is very cool but it’s a bunch of extra steps to set it up, especially if you want to chop samples at all.
Off the top of my head, the Gotharman Spazedrum and the Erica Synths LXR can morph between kits. Korg’s SQ-64 has random and stochastic modes which can seriously change the sound as well. The Vermona Perfourmer can change instantly between mono and poly, two settings each, which can change things drastically. But as for changing the sound completely, I’m not sure about that.
