I’ve recently been working on a tool that mimics Abletons clip follow actions.
Just finished it and tested most things. Before I go to bed I wanted to push it out,
so that others maybe have fun playing with it.
We start out with a nice gif animation of the workflow:
This only shows how to generate random continuations of that simple bassdrum.
But imagine expanding that to other parts of a drum pattern. Just from two
variations of each drum pattern part you can create a very varied drum
loop easily. Same with melodies. It’s a great way to get ideas and fill
holes in your arrangement or sections with at least something else than silence.
If I find the time and motivation I might put together a more throughout
demo of the tool. I also need to collect more experience with it myself, so consider
it an alpha/beta status.
Now some text from the readme file:
Please also read the Full README, it lists
the known bugs, recent changes and also poses as manual for the tool.
Each clip has it’s own length. And it will just be appended to the
previous generated clip. Thats all. If you got clips that are not power
of two long, you can set the “PoT Padding” to “empty” or “repeat”, which
will pad your clip up to the next power of two (8, 16, 32, 64, …).
“empty” basically means that the additional padding consists of empty
lines. and “repeat” means that the clip is repeated.
There is also a pre-multiplier which increases the length of a clip
by multiplying it by some factor. If you multiply it by 3, you get
your same clip repeated 3 times. So if you got a clip that is 5 lines
long, and multiply it by 3, you get a 15 line clip with the first 5
lines being repeated over and over again.
Very nice! Sounds well thought out, although I do know some people who nearly always write in LPB=12 so only the most basic mode would work for them. May be worth considering in the future…
Is there a Shrink/Expand option that would insert the clip at half/double time? Or do you need different clips for that?
Does it copy all data, including automation and pattern commands?
Well, there is nothing that prevents them from preparing their clips carefully in the first place
There is no other functionality that mangles the clips data except the length modifiers. In the end, people would
probably love to have the complete advanced edit functionality available to modify their clips on the fly.
It copies all columns (note and fx columns), like cut/copy & paste. But no automation data, which more or less
belongs to the track itself than the pattern data. I think the separation of automation data from pattern data
is quite important and useful. Like with the pattern aliases in the pattern matrix.
I wonder, does anyone actually use this tool in it current state? What are the experiences? I ask, because I developed a new approach, which is about rule based composition. And it builds on the “clips” that are definable here. Here is a rough documentation of the interface I designed for the rule based approach:
If noone actually uses the follow actions presented here, I would love to replace that part with this new approach. Which I think is much more straight forward and probably much easier to grasp and still offers equally many things.
The big difference is, that you can compose entire songs, and not just string clips together to fill a single track. A rule is basically what a “meta clip” is. It offers you to add “Alternatives”, which are randomly choosen based on the “weight”. Then the rule is split up into multiple “Timeslices”. Which offers the user fine grained control over the repetition. The “called rules” are then called to generate lines of song data. That can be for a single track as well as for multiple tracks. A “called rule” can either be directly data from the patterns, the so called “clips” or they can be another rule, which again has it’s own “alternatives” and “timeslices”.
I think this approach is much easier to use, because you can actually build upon your clips and get to an ever higher level of abstraction. These rules allow fine grained control over probability based drum lines as well as building entire tracks or sections based on probability and repetition. In the end it’s of course up to the user how he defines the rules.
The code for this is already implemented, but not tested well enough yet. And I would love to wait for feedback before releasing it and throwing away the “meta clip” concept.
Yea, I know Renoam. It’s a similar idea, but Renoam works on whole patterns in the pattern sequence. Originally I wanted to make a similar grammar based approach instead of a GUI. But I decided that a GUI is maybe easier to work with in the long run. Especially due to the fine grained “clip” approach.
No idea currently how a “combination” of Renoam and this would look like.
Ok, I’ve reworked the GUI of the rules a bit. See some posts above this one for the “documentation” in form of a commented screenshot.
I decided to discontinue the concept from the first design with follow actions being tied to “clips”. I will remove the follow action stuff
from the clip manager and make a new release soon.
Using the tool in its current state makes for very, very quick fills. Great time saver for trying random comps to “see what sticks” (lazy, lazy composer as I am).
For those who might want to algorithmically generate their entire composition (you totally knew the recording industry already did this, right), I think we’d need some sort of ‘snap beginning/end of clip to PoT or beginning/end of other clip’ layer for stuff like auto drum fills for medium-term composition, and auto bridges for longer-term composition.
But man, this thing just trivialises composition. I love it. Add graphs over time to modulate your ‘probability’ sliders and you’re done (that control would help position the ‘breakdown’ for a piece of pop music, or the climax in a more highbrow composition).
I am very pleased to be involved in the creative-destruction of the so-called creative industries B-)
I know this is an old thread, but anyone know where I could grab this tool from now? The hypelinks on this forum are dead. Also, any other recommendations for probability based sequencer view playback? Basically, I want the Maybe command for the ‘scenes’ themselves.
not sure if this is exactly what you’re after, but you can create multiple phrases (with their own yxx commands embedded, if you wish) then assign each phrase via keyzone to a different note, then in the pattern editor you can use these multiple notes (triggering different phrases) across multiple note lanes assigning each unique note/phrase a yx value in the vol or pan column… then slap a y00 in the fx column and have probabilistic triggering of various phrases in the pattern editor. easy to build up generative sequences this way. powerful and easy, once you get the hang of it. remember to place note-off commands before notes retrigger, or it will just all play on top of itself.
