Although there are some bits online and in this forum about Round Robin, I struggle to find a clear and concise way to do this, and especially focused on the Rytm Mk2, so wanted to place some information here for others and also point to some useful sounds to help with everything. Also maybe there are other ways to do this that might be useful to add that I don’t know about or maybe I get something wrong.
What is Round Robin?
If you are not sure what Round Robin is, it’s basically an efficient way to maintain the movement found in sounds coming out of analog circuitry that typically gets lost if using a single sample creating what is know as a “machine gun effect”. There is a really good example of the differences between the two using TR808 sounds.
808 Snare
808 Clap
808 closed Hat
Sample Chains didn’t work for me
After experimenting and failing with sample chains using OctaChainer v1.3 which is a great tool, but less so for this, I went a different route using the Sound Pool and a random LFO, which worked really well and is much easier to set up.
Getting some samples
For sounds I used the LonDonsen_Moore_TR808_Kit as these are free, quality, mono and already are setup for Round Robin use. I had the change the extension to .rar to open on my Macbook so I have also put these samples on my Github and should open without the need to change any extensions. They do include some NI Battery files in there as well, which I left in for transparency, but we don’t need these.
Setup and LFO settings
If loading a whole TR808 so to use every drum track on the Rytm Mk2, I’d recommend using 10 sounds per track, which fills up 120 of the 128 sound pools slots available. The samples linked above do have 16 available per sound so it might be useful to create another folder of 16 for some sounds you like using most, as with another folder it gets easier to navigate into that folder and simply “select all” if 10 or “select all” if 16, instead of clicking through one by one. 16 sounds will sound slightly better than 10, but 10 is good enough if a whole drum machines worth is running.
Let’s assume you have selected to use 10 clap samples. Load in all 10 claps in sequence to the Sound Pool, then in the track you wish to use the clap, load the 6th clap in that sequence to that track. When you hit the pad you should be hearing the 6th clap.
In that same track within the LFO section put in the following settings:
SPD (Speed) to 0
MUL and FAD as default
DST to Sample Slot
WAV (Waveform) to Random
SPH as default
MOD(Trig Mode) to TRIG
DEP(Depth) to +4.99
The LFO is going to be trigger each time selecting a sound between the first clap in the sample slot and the last clap.
Now you just do this for the next sound, the next, and so on, each time being sure to load the 6th in sequence of that next sound.
That’s it.
Some interesting behaviours
I did notice a few things. The Random LFO sometimes fires the same output more than once in a row. It might go 1, 4, 6, 10, 2, 2, 2, 4, 7, 5 etc. I don’t know why Elektron didn’t ensure that if a number is being used then +1 and if the number being used is the highest then -1…or something like this, to ensure no duplications, but there it is.
Another thing I noticed, and I think this is actually correct, if you set the DEP to 5 then on occasion it will play the wrong sound. It’s very rare, but it happens. So I think the 4.99 ensure that rounding works correctly, after all the LFO DEP goes to 127.99 not 128. I could be wrong on this but 4.99 seems to solve it.
Lastly, in a slightly non Round Robin style but sounds cool, you can use different LFO shapes, like the RAMP at set slightly different numbers in relation to the 16steps, to create a machine gun style sound that changes in it’s own timing, which is really nice. It immediately reminded me of Autechre, so obviously I will use that at some point haha.
If I have missed anything or need to clarify anything then shout and I will edit the post.
Enjoy.
