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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / jbarket's music / incoming. malfunction.

incoming. malfunction.

By jbarket on September 22, 2024 10:45 pm

another attempt at techmo with vcv rack. I'm still spending a lot of time trying to put together modules and sounds, and then seeing how it all fits together. I actually started this week with a metallic perc sound I really liked, that somehow didn't make it into the final track at all, haha.

my focus with these has been largely on groove. this doesn't have the same hip shake as last week, but it's still a good experiment in that direction.

some cool things under the hood here that are less relevant for the actual track but for the whole... techmo machine. I've got some complex stuff in here that's able to change multiple parameters at once, so I can do things like, move from one euclidean rhythm to another all at once.

I don't think it's rattling warehouse walls, but it could definitely be in the background while you're fighting off gangoons in Night City

This is great!!! It's so dark and moody. Almost industrial even! And agreed, while not specifically super hip-shaky, I 100% want to move and dance to this.

Less hip shaky and more kick-punchy!

I don't know what a euclidean rhythm is, but I like those bong sounds echoing through.
- Raioh

Devieus wrote:

I don't know what a euclidean rhythm is, but I like those bong sounds echoing through.
- Raioh

I need an animated gif that's like some Yugioh you've triggered my trap card bullshit, except the trap is always autism.

I know this is going to sound super nerdy, but I highly recommend reading this paper: https://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf. It's short, but covers the concept and provides a list of simple examples.

it is _fascinating_. in simplest terms, euclidean rhythm is where you have X beats occur over Y steps, spaced as equidistantly as possible. so like, 4 hits over a pattern length of 16 comes out as x---x---x---x--- which is your standard 4 on the floor kick pattern.

what I didn't get until I read the paper was how well it could be used to describe complex rhythms. tresillo, son clave, rumba clave, dembow and all sorts of other sort of... "world music" for lack of a better term... rhythmic patterns are easily expressed in a euclidean sequence. I was thinking about patterns that were incredibly mechanical and predictable, but the minute things don't divide out perfectly (like 3 hits per 8 steps for tresillo), you often end up with a ton of funk. and with weird lengths, you can easily end up with polyrhythms as things come together and diverge.

So how is it different from polyrhythms, just the fact there's only one?

Devieus wrote:

So how is it different from polyrhythms, just the fact there's only one?

it's just a way to describe each rhythmic pattern.

my dad was an incredible drummer, and the way he learned way back in the long long ago was "if you can say it, you can play it." so describing a rhythm for him would be like that.. like 1950s beatboxing, hahaha. my brain does not work that way in the least. I have a hard time even repeating myself if I'm trying to express it that way. but express it mathematically as [8,5] and I _immediately_ understand.

I guess that makes sense.
I reckon your father was taking about what those TikTok videos do where someone is drumming over someone else talking?

Very cool. What's the workflow like on VCV Rack for knob tweaky stuff? Are you using CC assignments or doing it all with the mouse?

ExtentOfTheJam wrote:

Very cool. What's the workflow like on VCV Rack for knob tweaky stuff? Are you using CC assignments or doing it all with the mouse?

Thanks!

There's a MIDI mapping module that makes it pretty painless. I've got a Keylab Essential and I can quickly map all of its knobs, sliders and buttons to similar things in VCV.

You can build custom controls in VCV pretty easily, so if it's something more complicated than I want to twiddle the frequency on this oscillator, I can build an interface to do whatever it is, and then just map that guy.

You can also do cool stuff with CV mixing so like, I can have some modulation source just happening to a control all the time, and then also map my controller to the same thing through a fixer. Then I can control the volume of each CV source so maybe I want my knob twiddling to just push things a little harder in the right direction, or maybe I want it to straight up override the other modulation.

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