[sdiy] A new sequencer idea - the 'human feel' ......

[Richard Wentk]

At 20:24 28/01/2006, Seb Francis wrote:
>Richard Wentk wrote:
>
>>
>>But for what it's worth randomness doesn't usually sound all that 
>>interesting, or musical. It would probably be more useful, but quite a 
>>bit more complicated, to add a +/- timing pot for each step, so you could 
>>have very fine control over the feel and could potentially match it with 
>>the groove in a loop.
>IMO, this is a *much* better idea than just adding randomness.  What you 
>have then is the ability to set a 'groove' to your sequence.  Personally 
>before building any hardware I would first play around in a software 
>sequencer and try out what pure randomness sounds like to you, as opposed 
>to a groove quantise which is repeating the same timing discrepencies for 
>each beat of the bar.

Yep. Random usually just sounds sloppy and wrong.

Groove control is pretty easy to do. Master clock is an ascending saw. Use 
a multiplexed row of pots to drive a comparator. Trigger each step off the 
rising edge. There's a little bit of extra complexity in making sure the 
pitch multiplexer switches at the right point, but nothing too frightening.

You get full ahead/behind the beat variability with a reasonable hardware 
count, and no worries about monostables or other messiness.

Richard