Rabid Elephant (makers of the Natural Gate eurorack module) had some really interesting thoughts on this topic. Apparently, they are hoping to make a groove box at some point that applies some of what they’re learning about how “fun/creation stage” relates to actually finishing tracks.
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Actually my drums used to be mostly printed Tr-8 bits. Mostly 4 separate tracks, (kick, snare, hat & various percussion) couple of bars and then I’d just mix and match while jamming out the clips into arrangement. 
I definitely had to commit but still had room to shove things around a bit that way.
I jam with ny Hardware and when I have something going, I record a few minutes of what ever it is. I bake the arrangement into that First recording. Then I usually do up to 10 (sometimes only 1) overdubs.
In the end I gainstage and apply tiny bits of EQ and compression
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Yes! The moment I have at least a basic skeleton of an arrangement in Ableton with the audio recorded from various hardware the chances of actually finishing the tune increase exponentially.
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Same here!
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This is my approach. For the exact same reasons. I started out playing in bands. We had to sound good before entering the studio to record.
You cant polish a turd. (I mean you can try, but you just end up smearing shit everywhere)
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Has anyone done a version of the Joy Division “Unknown Pleasures” cover (image originally from Harold Craft’s 1970 Cornell PhD thesis, based on the first pulsar discovered by Jocelyn Bell in 1967, and a reminder that the Nobel Prize is full of shit) from a groovebox viewpoint, where all the lines are exactly the same? Photoshoppers, go nuts.
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Thank you. I don’t know why doing it this way and comping didn’t cross my mind. Always spend too many hours multitrack recording the perfect take…
Grooveboxes could take back some of this ground if one could change patterns per track rather than globally. But none of the hardware I have can do this, EXCEPT my Usta Eurorack sequencer. I just might have to make this my nerve hub.
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Photoshop?! Sounds like a job for GnuPlot!
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The perfect take or a good enough take?
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To an extent it is fighting against the inherent feature of grooveboxes looping short chunks. But if one steps back and thinks about compositional structure and getting from one musical point to another, then a groovebox is fine to do this, so long as one is happy to change patterns a lot.
I’m not a composer by any stretch but I took a couple of music composition subjects at university. And they emphasised that you need to think about structure and the big picture, sometimes from the very start of the process, and not only the small scale.
So that’s definitely one strategy: start with a structure (possibly an arbitrary one) and then fill in the details.
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A nice feature for elektron boxes (though perhaps beyond current CPU capabilities) would be a ‘mutator’:
- User to make their first multi track X bars of loop (designated by type Drums, Bass, Lead, Chord etc) - the ‘seed pattern’
- hit a button to auto create 1 or more variation patterns (eg make one mutated pattern or a series of patterns) according to a chosen algorithm (more complex, less complex, chord progression, lead shuffle etc) and which tracks should be affected each of which will be differently treated depending on their type.
- Then user can audition the machine generated series of new variations and decide what to keep, delete, re-arrange or edit)
OP-Z sort of has bits of this capability.
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Like this?
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Just read through this v interesting thread. Watching R Tinez’s vid, I suspect he hasn’t explored the OT’s Arranger, at least he doesn’t mention it as an alternative to “moving things around” and adding further sequncing in/from DAW. And makes me realise I should use it next time I go about tracking OT and the gear it’s sequencing into DAW. Could well be more time efficient.
This is precisely the feature that interests me most in the push 3. I can get it by just fine on my MPC by duplicating patterns and changing the parts that I want for that iteration, but that can be quite time-consuming.
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Like the Force?
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… like MC-707 or MC-101 ?
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Or the 707. Ha, beat me to it.
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