Wotcha all you good people, I’ve got a quick question.
I’m toying with the idea of getting a Rytm. One thing I keep thinking about is using the pads in Performance mode for controlling long, slow, evolving drones.
Basically I’m imagining having infinite duration sounds on all 12 tracks and using the pads to fade them in and out, filter-sweep and modulate the sounds. I’d probably set most of them to silent or very quiet by default and use the pad pressure to sweep them in and out.
Has anyone tried this?
Related to this: most of the analogue machines seem to have decays in the synth menu. This makes perfect sense for drum sounds, but I’m wondering, is it possible to make endless tones with any of the analogue voices? Or would this drones idea be limited to samples?
the synth decay time is quite long in some instruments! But yeah they do fade out you’ll get better results using samples for that. With samples it’s easy, just set them to loop and you’re good
with the right samples, you definitely get cool drones!
regarding performance mode: this will work, but the pads require some amount of pressure, I imagine your fingers will get tired when doing prolonged pad-pressing. It might be easier to adjust parameters directly with the encoders, for slow fades and such, imo.
you also have LFOs and scenes though.
You could also set the tempo to very slow, and additionally set the time multiplier to 1/8, and use p-lock slides to sequence slow parameter sweeps…
regarding performance mode: this will work, but the pads require some amount of pressure, I imagine your fingers will get tired when doing prolonged pad-pressing. It might be easier to adjust parameters directly with the encoders, for slow fades and such, imo.
Good point. I think the A4’s performance mode would be more suitable for this. Many parameters on multiple voices can be tweaked with the knobs.
yea… you could of course hook up some MIDI fader / knob controller box and ctl the performance macros with it, while having the AR pads in MUTE or CHROMATIC mode
In all honesty, if you’re into drones, I would get an OT. Looping short samples is not quite the same as loading nice “drone material” in the OT.
Also, drones benefit immensely from LFOs, and having access to only 1 in the AR can feel severely limiting.
I’m not saying the AR can’t do drones, it sure can, but as has been pointed before, you’ll get sore fingers if you spend a lot of your time in performance mode. The OT’s crossfader is a much nicer way to make your drones evolve over time, in ways impossible with the AR (mostly in terms of smooth transitioning between scenes).