I’ve uploaded a new version of my thoughts on the Deluge. Included now is a section on polyphony and CPU, why sticking to the 1/16th resolution in Song mode is a really good idea, and my own outline on my workflow, to give all these ideas some context. Enjoy the read!
UnderstandingTheDeluge_v3.pdf (72.1 KB)
After a couple of hours sitting with the Deluge I think its an awesome piece of gear! I liked it immediately. It has a certain workflow I like. The only thing to really think about is its CPU power indeed. That is something I learned fast on the Deluge. Its CPU power. The other thing that you really have to think about is how you keep it simple. You can get lost in your tracks very fast. You have to have overview… @andreasroman you talk about sections. I didn’t try to make sections yet (color code?) It might be handy to color code some tracks. I know its possible but I thought that those tracks within one section gets armed at the same time, and that is not what I want.
Cloning is really handy and if you are using it clever its great!
There’s really just one thing you can’t do with sections, and that’s to play track duplicates at the same time. But you can:
Mute and unmute entire sections of tracks all at once.
Run tracks from different sections at the same time, and mute and unmute them as well.
Share tracks to run over all sections.
And do all this on cue, or at once.
Blows grandpa’s old pattern structure right back to the swinging 90’s.
@andreasroman Thanks for your excellent descriptions of the Deluge and its workflow Andreas - you’re providing a service to many lurkers who are eager to learn about this amazing machine.
I have a question that I’ve not found an answer to in the manual: does the Deluge have loop-preview as we see in DAW’s? That is, can I select a section of the sequence I’m working on to repeat while I am working on it? This is kinda essential when working on 16 or 32-bar melodic sequences. Alternatively can it simply start playing based on what notes are in view, as the Pyramid does from what I’ve heard?
I’ve been looking for a screenless sequencer that is suited to composing songs in a very melodic-baroque-romantic style, with long well-honed melodies and harmonic variation so your description of the Deluge sounds like just the ticket. The other sequencers look great but don’t seem suited to doing alot of melodic pitch editing.
Thanks for saying, I’m only happy to help.
I get the feeling we’re coming from the same place here. I like my tracks longer as well, and have a background in classical music (piano, to be more precise). When I went for the Deluge, I had an idea of working out my tracks completely linear, songs with more than 100 bars being no problem. Not so. Well, not as I expected, anyway.
The Deluge doesn’t have options to define start and end points beyond the actual length of a track. If you’ve got twelve bars, then twelve bars it is. You can’t tell it to loop between 5-7 as you’re doing detailed work on those sections, nor can you say “Just start from bar 3 from now on, I just don’t want the first two at all, anymore.” You can’t define certain parts of the track, cut them and paste them elsewhere, or anything of the kind. It’s very limited in this aspect, and it shows when you’re stretching the bars over a track. Basic hygiene stuff found in a DAW, just aren’t there.
Don’t let that stop you, though. It has a few other things going for it, which are surprisingly useful once you get into it. It can, first of all, duplicate an entire track on itself. So if you like your first and second bars, you can tell the Deluge to copy those into 3 and 4. And with a now total of 4, you can tell the Deluge to go from 4 to 8. Surprisingly convenient, especially when you’re working with drums or bass lines, where small variations might be desirable but the larger idea remains the same over the track. Not especially convenient for the kind of stuff you’re describing, but all the same, it’s there.
You can also, from any part of the track, launch it, if you want to work specifically from the 9th bar and not have to listen to your entire work up unto bar 9, before you hear your changes. It doesn’t loop, but you can at least tell it to start from a certain part of the track and go from there. Combined with the zoom feature, where you can on a very high or low level where you are in the track, you can be very precise in where you want to start the track and also very general, moving quickly over larger sections as your track grows.
Also, when it comes to actually inputing notes and music in the sequencer, the Deluge is by far the best piece of gear I’ve ever used. The Pyramid doesn’t compare, in this particular aspect. You can literally see the music before you, thanks to the grid and the colors used. Your track gets a visual identity and if you’re familiar with sheet music or similar, you’ll find this is close to that, as an experience. Creating rests, ties, fourths and eights and triplets and rolls and stuff, is just stupid easy and highly enjoyable. You’ll work the Deluge like piece of sheet, once you’ve gotten to know it.
I tend to look at my owns songs as linear works, but I always work in a non-linear fashion. For that purpose, the sections in the Deluge come in handy. You can look at them as part of a movement, if you’re into classical stuff. If you were to write a sonata, for example, I’d say to split up the first 8-12 bars into one section, then the following into another section and perhaps the last part into a third section. That’d be your first part of the sonata, the one that always gets repeated twice before you move into the next part of the movement. And when you divide it like so, the end result is actually clearly defined start and end points within a larger piece. They’re not as flexible in terms of where they start and end, but on the other hand, they’re like isolated parts of your puzzle that blends together on their own once you play your song.
So even if the Deluge were to get more edit features for track editing, I’d still stick to my workflow now, but appreciate the additions for working within the tracks. But I wouldn’t reach for longer tracks anyway, because the implementation of sections in the Deluge means I don’t have to.
Thanks for the in-depth answer.
It sounds like the Deluge works quite similarly to Korg Gadget on iOS: you build up a series of multi-track sections (a few bars long) that are then chained together to create a longer piece, with each section being optionally loopable or reusable any number of times.
I take it that the setting of the start point for playback is easily done with just two or three button presses? If that’s the case then this way of working would suit me fine. Keeping the sections a reasonable length would help with this and also makes editing the arrangement easier: I find that often repeats of short sections are being added, removed or shuffled around long after all the notes have been written.
My background is as a guitar player with an interest in music theory. Harmony is relatively easy to understand with widely available materials but it’s melody that eluded my understanding for years because as far as I can tell no-one knows how to teach an essential, elegant understanding of it. Over the years I’ve gradually improved my model of how to write strong melodies and with the help of the piano roll in Korg Gadget and some simplified Counterpoint theory I believe I finally cracked the code a few months ago.
Problem is I have a health condition that causes me a lot of pain whenever I do intensive work with screens/computers/gadgets, so sitting down and churning out a bunch of music has not been an option. I’ve toyed with the idea of writing on paper which I’m sure would quickly improve my rudimentary sight-reading skills, but frankly I’m lazy and there would still be the problem of getting the notes into MIDI, rearranging, mixing etc. Perhaps the Deluge is the answer, I don’t know but at the asking price it’s worth a punt I think.
Yes, it’s similar to Gadget in spirit. Each track can have its own length, and all tracks within a section can play together. You can even sync up tracks across the borders and have tracks from different sections play together, as long as they’re not duplicates of each other.
I had a Pyramid for awhile and I liked it. But if I’d gone for just a hardware sequencer today, disregarding the fact that the Deluge is actually a complete workstation, I’d still go for the Deluge. The Pyramid is superior in terms of editing features and song building, but when it comes to just writing music, it doesn’t come close to the Deluge.
Again, I think this depends largely on how you view the idea of music on an abstract plane. Some can read sheet music, some can’t - some hear songs in their head before they sit down, some need to play to find them. Some build stuff with twenty plus tracks, others settle for just a drum and a synth. I own a Sub37 partly because it’s so beatiful. Others would sneer at the idea of making a decision based on such a criteria.
So the Deluge makes sense to me, cause it works like my brain works. The Pyramid didn’t. Depending on how you’re wired, it’ll be right for you, or not.
That sounds right up my alley: playing instruments is fun and all but when it comes to composing I’m simply far smarter if I use a tool that keeps things abstract and laid out for me.
There’s a quote from one of the long-dead Italian baroque composers (Corelli I think) to the effect of saying how lucky he was not be a pianist (he was a violinist by trade) so was initially forced to compose on paper, away from any instrument. He said it saved him from being just another of the dozens of thumpers banging away on the keys!
I agree with Corelli: people who can write complex, coherent music directly on an instrument without falling foul of muscle memory are few and far between and for sure I’m not one of them.
I do like the Pyramid’s solution to this with the Euclidean functions: they’d be great for coming up with rhythmic variations to parts and imparting feels that I’d never come up with. The workflow for inputting and editing notes is too much of a compromise though, given that it is the central activity for me.
I’ve run into an unexpected issue with the Deluge, which I’m sharing here partly because maybe someone knows the answer but also, if there is none, it’s worth pointing out.
I’m a keyboard player at heart and making music with playing the keys, won’t be an option for me until I lose my hands for whatever reason. So eventually, the time came to hook up the Deluge to my Sub37. And man, what a treat. The Deluge comes alive when connected to a keyboard. The synth engine has a lot more expression going for it than what many of the demos tell, if you play it like a keyboard. So there’s that, and that’s awesome.
However - as I mapped the Sub37’s lovely controls to my first patch, mapping cutoffs and envelopes and resonances and even the occassional dist and noise option too, I realised that these mappings remain as I move to another patch. So when I’d mapped up my ten favourite patches to the Sub37, turning the knob on one patch, affected all the others, too! That makes it pointless for me. It’s great for a live setup, you can rig it like so and use it like that. But as a way to create a more tactile and hands-on editing experience, it just won’t work. And that was my intention all along.
I’ve done my research, shifted my midi channels around, read the manual - no luck. Fortunately, I’m not that clever, so I’m hoping I’ve missed the obvious here and someone will chime in and go: “Oh, you silly. You just need to wire the patch mod to the amp output, and then use the gate converter to the laser blaster, and you’re good.”
But if not, this might just break the deal for me. Cause as much as I love having it all inside this glorious box, I can’t disconnect myself from the keyboard playing experience in the long run and th Deluge is so lovely together with a keyboard.
Maybe it’s Sub37 sending some kind of absolute control ?
Have you tried with some generic midi surface, see if it does the same ?
Might just be a bug, don’t you think so ?
Nope. I’ve since learned through the Deluge forum that this is by design. I’m not the only one who don’t approve.
But - I found a way around it. Muting a track shields it from external control, which works for me. So the issue’s solved 
What has been done by design may be undone by design… 
I felt like you were rather fast to ditch your last marvel, any gripe you’d been hiding us, dear ?
I haven’t ditched it quite the contrary, I use it every day still. If you’re talking about the Deluge, that is.
I’m thinking this might be my next box. We’ll see come December.
How easy is it to hit the CPU wall?
Depends. If you’re doing minimal techno, it won’t happen, especially if you resample a lot. A solid beat, bass, lead, chords and maybe a loop or two, won’t break it. But around there, you’d be getting close.
There are many ways around it, though. It’s nothing like the tired Electribes. The Deluge CPU eats those for breakfast.
I was just watching a video on the 1.2 update…
I have to say, I continue to be impressed by this piece of hardware - it’s quite drastically different from everythng else, extremely self contained and powerful…
I’m hoping some day a V2 will come, with a decent screen, and maybe more outputs?
Those are the two areas which let v1 down. It’s still an awesome machine but…
Honestly, I’m still struggling with the workflow. There’s some kind of brick there when you’re working on something with a larger coherence, which makes the Deluge harder to finish stuff on. At least for me.
Well @andreasroman, if you feel the workflow is not for you, let me know. I´ll take it off your hands at once (i live in Gbg) for a really good price (for you). I have very little patience and waiting until December for the next batch is really torture for me. 
Unfortunately, I’ve had a bit of a breakthru. It really is a matter of understanding the Deluge and letting go of ideas on what you’re used to and expect. Then, it just flows after that.
None of this is helping you, of course, but it’s worth the wait, I can tell you.