Hello folks,
Warning: long post.
Much electronic music makes use of build ups: rolling snares or claps, followed by cymbals or the well known filter sweep over white noise, followed by a big bassdrum boom…whatever…In this post I show you a way of combining serveral features of the ot so that several variants of build ups can be triggered with only a few button presses during performance. All variants live in one track.
Since putting this to work requires some understanding about the relation between samples, tracks, the master sequencer, one shot triggers and slices, I cover those as well. I will start with something simple and refine and expand further.
First things first:
The track that I am going to use for holding the build up is going to be track 4. I put a flex machine in it and assign a cymbal sample to the flex machine.
If the ot is in track mode, you can trigger the sample by pressing trigbutton 12. In track mode, the first 8 trigbuttons will trigger TRACKS, while the last 8 trigbuttons will trigger SAMPLES (or, strictly speaking, the flexmachine holding that sample).
Every time I hit trigbutton 12 the cymbal is played, that is: it is played immediately. Sometimes this is usefull, but not for what I want: I want that cymbal hit at the beginning of my pattern and want the ot to help me with overcoming the inadequacies of my own timing.
Therefore I dive into the sample edit menu: The last entry of the attributes page is what I need. I set the “quantized trig” parameter to pattern length. Now, every time I press trigbutton 12 the cymbal will not be triggered until the pattern reloops.
This is convienent: Say my pattern length is set to 64…I can hit trigbutton 12 any time during the loop, knowing that the cymbal will not hit…until the whole pattern reloops and the cymbal is triggered at the first step of the next loop. So if I press that triggbutton NOW I know that in the FUTURE the cymbal will hit and that it’ s timing is correct…
The first refinement is easy:
Instead of loading a cymbal, I load a sample which holds 8 samples of different cymbals and slice it. Put a random lfo on the slice number and every time the cymbal hits, you get one of the 8 variants at random. This brings things slightly more alive
At this point we have not done anything with the track yet. There are no triggers on it. The track is completely clean and once you start the sequener, you will see the red light moving through the steps, which are all empty…
Second refinement:
I Dive into the flexmachine sample list and load a couple of different snares/claps into several slots. After that, I put the ot in slot mode. I can now trigger those snare samples with the trig keys.
I start the sequencer and put it on live record.
I live record a build up by hitting those snare samples to taste. Refining or correcting errors can be done afterwards. In this case the build up takes 64 steps.
What we have now is easy: A track containing several hits of snares that form a build up while the flex machine on that track is still assigned to the cymbal sample. The problem we now have is that those stupid snares are heard every time the pattern plays. Therefore I dive into the pattern settings menu and set track 4 to “plays free”. I also set it to “one shot track”.
By doing so, the track does not play anymore as it is disconnected from the main sequencer. I can trigger the track by putting the ot in track mode and hitting trigbutton 4. Hitting that button will trigger the track…immediately which is not what I want. Again dive into the pattern settings menu and set “trig quantization” to “track length”.
At this point I am pretty much where I want: Two trigbuttons are important: Trigbutton 4 tiggers the track. The quantization guarantees that it will always do that at the beginning of the pattern. Trigbutton 12 will still hit my cymbal. Again: quantization takes care of the timing. During performance I can now:
-hit a simple cymbal (button 12)
-start a build up with snares followed by nothing (button 4)
-hit a cymbal followed by a build up with snares (button 4 and 12)
-start the build up followed the cymbal (again trig 4+12)
-etc. etc.
Third refinement:
Let’ s assume that in the last bar of my build up track, trigs 9 to 16 are all lit and all hit the snare…
I remove all the triggers on steps 10 to 16. On trig 9 I use parameter locks on the retrig parameter: set retrig to 8 and retrig time to 1. The track still sounds the way it did, but by using retriggering this way, all triggers on step 10 to 16 are not needed anymore. I mimicked triggering the snare on those steps by using the retrig parameter.
Why would I do this? Easy: to make room for someting else: I now put one shot trigs on step 10 to 16 and (sample)lock them to whatever I want on those steps, thus creating an extra variant.
Now, while performing I have several options:
-Hitting trigbuttons 4 and 12 give you the snare/cymbal combos in any way you want as described above.
-Arming track 4 (hit the yes button) arms the one shot triggers on track your build up track and gives you another variant.
So…during performance only three buttons are needed to come up with all kinds of variations of build ups…quantised and all in one track…
Add sliced samples and random lfo’ s to make it even more alive or hide some extra one shot triggers elsewhere in the track…oh, and your scenes are still free to add even more variety.
M.
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