There’s a homebrew app for PSP, PSPseq, that gives the option to set the probability of a note when you enter it. This really adds a lot of life to short patterns, be it percussion, or melodies, and i’ve grown quite fond of it. Of course i’m not fond of composing on the PSP…
I would love to see something like this implemented in Renoise.
I don’t know what the most elegant way could be, but i was thinking of a pattern effect command.
Maybe 0Pxx or something along those lines.
example: 0P50 could translate to 50% probability of triggering the note.
I supposed the absence of the command would be 100% probability of triggering the note.
It would probably be implemented with a range of 00 - 80 and not 00 - 99, but the above was just an example.
Wow, that would be a cool thing to have. Also randomness when it come to velocity, accuracy of note-on / note-off is something I’m interested in having.
In Cubase I used to use it’s feature where you could set f.ex how accurate a note would be triggered within a certain limit. One way I used this was to trigger 3 different clap-sounds, and this resulted in that there became some space between the different claps which was different every time, which made it sound very natural and gave an “live” feeling to it.
I’ve been thinking if there’s currently a way to do this randomness stuff in Renoise or EnergyXT, but haven’t come up with anything really.
I personally like the idea of controlled randomness
Can it be done in Renoise already without EnergyXT?
This is just an idea, but someone more proficient could perhaps pull it off:
set an LFO to volume of a track
apply a gate to mute the track if the volume is too low
normalize (somehow) the volume afterwards, perhaps with a compressor? (never knew how to properly use those)
This would in my imagination make the note on a track sometimes play and sometimes not play. Not very flexible and not really random but if you put an LFOs to control LFOs then you can get some pretty hard to predict behaviour.
Any other ideas?
I say, +10000 … I’d love this ability… but every time someone comes up with this idea, it gets shot down. Including when I wrote up a nice lengthy post on it. Good luck!
BYTE-Smasher, could you please direct me to your previous posts or any other thread discussing this idea? I’m curious to read more arguments against the idea
edit: sorry nevermind, i found them. i should search before i type…
Hi, I’m the guy who made PSPSeq. Glad to see my concepts can create some controversy. Must be doing something right.
As for probabilities on retriggering, when I first thought of it it was a quick shortcut to make constantly changing loops when I was writing music for highly memory limited processors (check this page for some music made for a DSP with 16k of memory). Anyways, when I took what I learned from that project and made PSPSeq I decided to keep probabilities in there. They’re computationally cheap and useful. What I found is that they’re really great when used in conjunction with triggering drum loops for drum and bass. By placing a lot of low probabilities hits with different WAV start and end points you quickly end up with a nice glitchy drum beat that pretty much never repeats. I have a not so great tutorial demonstrating this on youtube here. It should be good enough to get the point across.
I must admit I’m not a Renoise user but I think it’s a worthwhile idea to include. Putting a random LFO on the trigger volume just isn’t the same.
Dunno why I’m so against this… it wouldn’t hurt as a feature, simply a column you can hide.
But I still have to say it, just as a general rant: I hate fractal music. Speed it up and you get “Fuddel-Jazz”, just meandering melodies that never go anywhere and therefore ultimately carry no emotion for me. That in turn makes me feel as if time and meaning is being sucked out of my life, or at least diluted.
The same goes for glitchy beats, unless you micromanage them by hand - and unless you got some funk in your bones yourself - they are boring to me, it sounds like muzak, and even a 4 to the floor beat cleanses my soul in comparison.
I’m aware that some stuff needs some attention to find the inner structures, that what sounds like randomness on the surface can be music inside… but when it’s randomness inside, too, it’s just not music for me. It’s like bird song - nice, reminds you of music, but not music.
That’s the beauty of this implementation of programmatic music… all you’re doing is setting the probability of a note playing, so ultimately, you’re defining every detail of your melody, and simply randomizing whether specific notes play or not. The same goes for drums, as this would be excellent for doing things like quickly making a hihat rhythm that has variation without having to program the randomness of all the weak beats by hand.
You’ll never end up with meaningless melodies unless you program them that way in the first place. This will just be used to add accents to your base melody. It’s simply for making more interesting icing on the cake.
Dunno. I’d like it if you could define the random generator seed, so that you’d get the same random sequence every time - unless you change a probability or the seed. That would allow to at least say “hey, I like this sequence” or “something isn’t quite right, maybe another seed will produce something I like more”.
But that’s just me. I mean that seriously… I’m not voting against the feature, but I’d never ever use it for anything except render to sample (unless it is implemented with “repeatable randomness”). I don’t even use the random LFO because it has no point for me without a seed and repeatable sequence…
I guess I’m just weird that way. An example is the intro of [this](http://johann-lau.de/flalaCollage Wider_War.mp3~~a~sh). I’m pretty sure it depends on specific VST bugs, because it sounds completely different in any Renoise version beyond 1.5… and even in 1.5 I have to load the tune, hit play, hit panic, then load it again and render instantly to get the “canonical version”. Sometimes I have to try that several times for it to work. And even if “variant versions” wouldn’t sound so lame in comparison - what’s the use when I can’t change anything in the song without knowing wether I will ever get it to render with a decent intro?
If you can write an algorithm that will make “funky accidents” EVERY time I’d hang out in your club 24/7 and buy all your albums. If you spill coke over a computer and it does that without anybody knowing WHY, I would do the same - all that matters is wether the music is any good for me! But nobody has done that so far, and I doubt anybody ever will.
And as a general thought, I think more work should be put in the cake and less in the icing. All the broken shattered stuff is beginning to bore me very, very deeply. NEWSFLASH, LIFE DIES AND THE UNIVERSE DECAYS. It’s sooooo 10.000 BC to put on a skeleton mask and dance your fears away, it really is. I want the Amiga back and all the beautiful melodies, instead of this stuck up pale crap. If that offends anyone, so be it. It offends me too, it has been for years, and I just accept it because ultimately I feel pity, just like I feel bad about saying what I say right now. But I have to. it’s too fucking cold! Where’s the lust for life gone??? It’s bad enough this shit is pushed on teens by the industry, why imitate it? Fuck the system, fight the sytem.
Uhm.
If that wasn’t going off a tangent I don’t know what is… felt good though. It’s all about the controversy
so +1
