posted 23 February 2010 07:20            

I am currently using Ableton Live's MIDI sequencer to drive a very cool monophonic sound played by Kyma. Everyone has been very happy so far, and now we are preparing for recording the song.

Using Live as an arpeggiator is not very handy, plus it causes an additional MIDI round-trip that is not desirable. Also, I don't want to use Live only for the arpeggiator, so if I can do that in Kyma, that even better.

I am having difficulties to figure out how to constrain the chords I play to a given scale (and mode: major/minor) and then play some variations on those chords (the basic work of an arpeggiator).

If anybody had a similar arpeggiator to share with me, I would be very happy. The arpeggiators included in the Kyma distribution are very interesting but not as handy as Live's arpeggiator. I think that would be a great sound to create, and I would be happy to start working on it if someone could give me the initial hints on how to get started.

posted 23 February 2010 09:13            

CamArpeggiate.kym

Please describe the desired behavior of the arpeggiator (and especially how it differs from the example arpeggiators in Kyma).

quote:

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I am having difficulties to figure out how to constrain the chords I play to a given scale (and mode: major/minor) and then play some variations on those chords (the basic work of an arpeggiator).

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Do you want to play a chord on the keyboard and have the arpeggiator play the individual pitches of that chord sequentially in different permutations?

In the attached Sound, you play a sequence of 8 pitches on the keyboard (these could be in the scale you want). Then the Sound plays through those captured pitches in random order. Starting from this point, how would you want to change it?

Thanks!

posted 23 February 2010 18:07            

This arpeggiator takes a base scale and mode, there is also a chromatic mode.

When you play a chord, notes are played by the arpeggiator and are shifted up or down with respect to a pitch shift value expressed in semitones. The arpeggiator ensures the notes stay in the scale so the chords you play sound alright. If the chromatic mode is chosen, the notes are simply shifted.

You can also choose between different orders in which the notes composing the chord are to be played. This is useful for choosing the melody of the arpeggios.

posted 05 March 2010 09:58            

For setting up the transposition scheme, you should take a look at a file that I have posted awhile ago on the tweaky:
http://www.symbolicsound.com/zzz/pub/Share/Sounds/TransposeincomingKBD.kym

It is not currently set up in a sequencer, but that could be easily done. The sounds are currently set up to take incoming midi note numbers and transpose them to a selected scale. The second sound actually lets you define intonations as ratios (or select from the ones that are already defined).

The scales are defined in a script near the output of the sound, and any fields that want to reference them from earlier in the some (i.e to the left of the script) can refer to them as a green variable:for example, ?dorian or ?melodicMinor. The green variable refers to an array.

You could just send any note via your sequencer and transpose it like I am doing in the !TransposedNN global controller. Or, you could just reference the arrays directly in your sequencer, so you could put in your sequencers pitches field:

{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree1 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree2 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree3 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree4 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree5 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree6 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree7 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree8 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree9 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree10 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree11 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree12 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree13 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree14 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree15 of: ?justMajor)}
{60 nn + (!ScaleDegree16 of: ?justMajor)}

Take a look. Now that I've set up a library of scales and intonations I find it a very convenient system (I'm sure there would have been a way of writing the scripts that wouldn't have required me to write out the entire scales across several octaves, that was kind of a pain, but after it was done it was great to be able to forget about them...)

Phil

posted 07 March 2010 12:24            

quote:

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Originally posted by SSC:

In the attached Sound, you play a sequence of 8 pitches on the keyboard (these could be in the scale you want). Then the Sound plays through those captured pitches in random order. Starting from this point, how would you want to change it?

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(!BPM bpm s random abs * 7) seed: 1

Very nice example of the new seed: message !

Could it be possible to make the seed a hot value? That when the seed changes during runtime, the random stream starts again but with the new seed.

posted 08 March 2010 06:22            

CristiansCamArpeggiate.kym

Created a nice sound that is basically an arpeggiator , from the SSC starter above.

Now has an Arp Mode switch and features Gate Hold logic I've been working on, to hold over silent stages of the sequence.

If you increase the Polyphony in the sequencer you get more music. I can't figure out why with more voices, the pitches are stepped through the Gate Hold logic, but its musical, and so I stuck with it.