Octatrack, machinedrum, kaospad3 fun

Elektronauts Our Music
1

One of my fans (hihi, the 4 I got) was getting nervous. dreammer you promised a new ep… where is it… sorry dude, I had to reply… its still on the cuttingfloor. But being a friendly type… I decided to give him a glimps of the ep after the ep… fan happy, me happy… everybody happy. atleast I hope. then again… their might be more happiness to be found. so lets explain a few things what is going on… and show the vid, so some of you might feel inspired to try out the same techniques :slight_smile:

So lets explain whats going on on the machinedrum used:
For these experiments. I wanted my machinedrum to fake a monomachine. (I got one, but I don’t have enough fingers to control them all) … so step 1 was: get a supply of single-cycle-waveforms.
I created 32 of them in renoise, using my awesome sample-editing and vstskills to get tiny fragments in tune and saved them as 32 individual mono 16bit 44.1khz wav-forms… and uploaded these to my machinedrum in 1 go…

Hooray: my machinedrum was ready to rock… empty of patterns, but ready.

Knowing I would cutup the output of my machinedrum to almost the point of being unrecognisable. the next step was to make lots of patterns:
so I did… each bank has 4 patterns in it. equally spaced… so when time progresses, I can still add 3 variations if necessary.

so bank A has pattern A01, A05, A09, A13 filled with goodness… (and so has bank B and Bank C etc etc. If you must know… I started with A09, then B09, then C09 etc etc… then I started making A01, B01, C01 ,D01 etc etc.

I do this, cause its easier to keep track of where I left off. and a bit of efficiency: when I started with A01, the pattern was a copy of B13, which I rewrote using that kitb13 saved as kita01… so most patterns are alike, but difrent… keeping them so to speak…

the tracks used on the machinedrum are kinda as followed:
track 1 to 8 are drumsynthie sounds…
track 01 = kick
track 02 = share
track 03 = hihat
track 04 = clap
track 5 to 8 are assorted sounds.
in some kits, the snare and hihat are also triggering track 15 and 16 to get phatter sound… in a few patterns, its other tracks. but I shouldn’t have done… keeping things “alike” really helps workflow… practice time and all that…

track 09 to track 14 is used for the single cycle madness… where I created bleeps and synthie sounds and bass sounds… using the lfo’s to bring some movement in them… hooray.

On the octatrack… in this video… only 1 pattern is used! . I haven’t made other patterns yet (well apart from 3 other testing patterns)
here is the setup:
track 01 to 04 are routed into the cue… which goes to kaospad3

track 01 = input machinedrum, recorded and playback at the same time… so I can introduce some glitchery and re-rating on the fly.
track 02 = unused (it had the kaospad input for a moment)
track 03 = voice going aaaw
track 04 = synthy dub sounds.
track 05 records track8 and NOT mainout… though because track8 is set as mastertrack. if I record track8 I get full volume, instead of the level set on the mastertrack… (important, else I get volume dips) and it will only record when I tell it to (remember to turn on quick recording mode in your settings)
track 06 records track08 on a continuous loop… where I retrigger the sample in weird ways… so if I set the scene, to make it audible, you get glitches and weird reverb on reverb effects…
track 07 does a similar thing. but with kaospad input :slight_smile:

believe it or not… only 8 scenes used. 01 and 02 to hear everything that’s happening now in 2 difrent pitches… scene 08 and 09 (if my memory is correct) will introduce glitches… and scenes 15 and 16 used for transistion and glitch trickery…

So that’s all hardware setup I think:

so what happends when I am playing.

well, I used function + encoder function on machinedrum, to change all tracks to its new value… (making thin sound) and basicly let first 3 tracks play (so I have rhythm) . break the incoming audio in pieces and play them back and effecting it with scenes… at some point… I reset the kit… so I get the full pattern playing, and slowly mute/unmute things, while using the scenes on the octatrack effect it all… and ofcourse the whole thing going through kaospad, where I used the granulating filter-modes, driven bij pad-motion function… during the build-down fase… I sample track 8 using track 5… so I got data for the transistioning trick… when I got a nice recording… I fade into it… set another pattern on the machinedrum… and slowly unmute track 1 to 3 and fade into it. so you hear the old beat fading into the new beat… after that I introduce the other elements (buildup) … and climax a bit… build it down again… sample that… build up again… and restart transitioning phase … and well dreammer is your uncle…

with this setup, and workflow… I be able to keep doing this until I run out of patterns… lets say I can turn 1 pattern into a 3 minute movement in the whole thing… the 64 patterns I end up with on my machinedrum will be about 180minutes of music… tadaa… 3 hour set. and well… if I keep up with my own conventions… I will not have that much to remember, so it should not be that difficult to play the set… I only have to keep track of time, and make sure I got the correct scene’s set and the correct things muted while doing transitioning trick.

so that’s the whole deal… feel free to ask all kinda questionings if you want… I know it was a long flaky story (I am not a writer) and I might not explained something deep/well enough…

enjoy

2

hey dreammer!
really enjoyed the jam, great sounds!
nice to have an in-depth explanation of your setup and creative process :slight_smile:
looking forward to more of this :joy:

3

fun wild jam as usual :slight_smile:

i’m discovering that with some good 1-cycles the md can emulate and even outdo the mnm for certain things. try taking one of your waves, placing it on a few different md tracks, and tuning them to form a chord. you can filter and eq each voice with the track effects so the chord sounds decent. then aim the lfos of 4 other tracks to the chord’s voices – for example put rising triangle waves on the filter freq for each voice and let the sequencer trig them, so every time it hits you get a wah sound (and that’s a really simple example of what’s possible).

the fun begins when you sample the results into a ram machine and play back the ram-p contents through the md’s reverb and delay. it often gives me full, shimmering mnm-style chords that you might dig, and you can slice them for variation.

4

[quote=““dubathonic””]
fun wild jam as usual :slight_smile:

i’m discovering that with some good 1-cycles the md can emulate and even outdo the mnm for certain things. try taking one of your waves, placing it on a few different md tracks, and tuning them to form a chord. you can filter and eq each voice with the track effects so the chord sounds decent. then aim the lfos of 4 other tracks to the chord’s voices – for example put rising triangle waves on the filter freq for each voice and let the sequencer trig them, so every time it hits you get a wah sound (and that’s a really simple example of what’s possible).

the fun begins when you sample the results into a ram machine and play back the ram-p contents through the md’s reverb and delay. it often gives me full, shimmering mnm-style chords that you might dig, and you can slice them for variation.[/quote]
There is a pattern somewhere in bankD where I do chordy stuff with the same single cycle on difrent tracks, slightly lfo’s (and yes, its not in this movie) … I haven’t used your tip though… and I might just do it… cause I didn’t think what I got was the most I could get out of it… your approach sounds interesting and fun. (better then my idea) … so thank you…
small question though… what be a good idea to sample just the chord in the uw-ram ? as far as I know its mainouts or inputs… will it be a good idea to put some audiocable in an output… and route it into an input and sample that… or is there a more clever approach?

5

[quote=“” the_dreammer""]

small question though… what be a good idea to sample just the chord in the uw-ram ? as far as I know its mainouts or inputs… will it be a good idea to put some audiocable in an output… and route it into an input and sample that… or is there a more clever approach?

[/quote]

you bet. the simplest way i have found doesn’t require any extra cables. i do it using what i call a “prep pattern” … a kit and pattern made specifically to do nothing else besides create the raw chord and sample it into the ram machine. it’s basically just a 1-bar pattern where all the 1-cycle wave rom machines, all the lfos aimed at them, and the ram-r machine are trigged on the first step. that way the whole creation process is “automated” and all i have to do is run through that pattern once to load the ram machine with whatever chord i want, all in just a couple of seconds without stopping the music.

i should mention that i don’t allow this prep pattern to play audibly through the speakers … i kill the md’s volume briefly while it runs cos the initial process doesn’t sound terribly musical. but with your setup the volume cut is easy to do in a number of ways, either with the md’s master volume or with your ot or kp3.

incidentally, prep patterns are a great way to get around the 2.5 meg memory limit. if you set up a number of prep patterns like this, you could have lots of different chords ready to load into your ram machines and still not come close to using up the uw memory. take it further by creating prep patterns that involve multiple chords and multiple ram-r machines.

enjoy :slight_smile:

6

Hmm, you are totally right… and that prep pattern, I could play while I play the loop I recorded on the OT… doesn’t matter that much in my style, if I take 4 bars or 8 bars for transitioning… hell I bet I could write patterns that do your trick, that can even be audible in combi with what the ot is doing… in reality I don’t do that much sampling on the kaospad… its either a preamp while making samples… or its an fx device…

Good idea bro… thank you