• Techniques
  • Fantastic video on generative Modular music (p.2)
2016/11/06 14:16:13
Wookiee
Interesting stuff thanks to the OP, Jeff and Drew having just invested in Softube's Modular soft synth all your comments are useful.  The Modular from Arturia is nice Jeff this new one is interesting as well.  Bit of a learning curve but fun. 
2016/11/11 02:47:10
sharke
I'm a big fan of generating pitches (and rhythms) through non-standard methods - I don't see anything wrong with it from a musical standpoint as long as you're using your musical taste to filter out the crap. 
 
I will work obsessively like some demented scientist trying to rig something up and tweak it until interesting music comes out of it. Recently I struck gold by assigning a MIDI kit in Jamstix to a diatonic scale, outputting that MIDI to a synth and then tweaking the Jamstix kit and brain until it made some kind of musical sense. Of course because it's Jamstix you get a lot of very human sounding rhythmic interest, but you have to really work on tweaking the notes of the kit in order to get the kind of tonality you want. And then of course Jamstix comes with hundreds of different styles and grooves with an almost infinite range of accents and fills. If you set it up right (and it takes a LOT of obsessive tweaking) you can get it jamming on a riff or sorts but putting out endless variations so that it sounds like a human player improvising around a theme. 
 
So anyway, I printed out a good ten minutes of Jamstix MIDI like that, and then I wondered what else I could do with it. I have Blocks in the free Reaktor 6 player and it comes with a pretty crazy XY sequencer module, which if left running freely can generate all kinds of melodic craziness, but if you feed it some crazy MIDI to start off with then that MIDI also influences the proceedings. I've not delved into Blocks in detail so I really have no idea how the XY sequencer works, but once again endless tweaking got me some pretty crazy jazz fusion style runs with endless variations. The Jamstix MIDI provided the diatonic tonality, whereas whatever crazy stuff the XY module was doing would take the notes "outside" every now and then. Played together with the riffing synth created earlier and it really did sound like a couple of crazy musicians locked in tight and improvising around each other. 
 
It's not the kind of thing you can get great musical results with off the bat, but if you persevere and tweak things constantly then something great emerges. 
 
My fascination with algorithmic music started when I was a kid - there was a video game called Ballblazer by Electronic Arts (I think) which had this really cool music which had these crazy jazz funk sounding runs in them. I found out that they were fractal generated and it amazed me because it sounded so musical. 
12
© 2024 APG vNext Commercial Version 5.1

Use My Existing Forum Account

Use My Social Media Account