Chained variations

@icaria36 hey :sunglasses:

Even though I haven’t resisted to include some technical thoughts on that, I also tried to make a couple of examples.

Half of my life I played “analog” music, so to speak, like guitars or all sorts, kalimbas, jembes etc. and it’s perfectly clear for me that it’s a lot more fun to “trigger” sounds directly with your hands rather than program them, placing by hand on some grid when there’s a possibility not to do that. That’s why, by the way, I also made that finger drumming wish, but it’s another story. Sometimes players just need to have an interface to connect with music to feel it better and our hands are the interface. Luckily, Play offers the way to record midi notes directly.

1. So, if player uses midi, he could make use of longer progressions playing them live, like I said in the wish. Yeah, you can record just one part, chain it with patterns or something, than record another part, copypaste etc. but it would be so much easier to record just one long chain of variations and make them switch automatically. Benefits:

  • having fun playing music instead of building it
  • avoiding limitations caused by switching between patterns (knobs positions resets with a start of a new pattern, for example)
  • some of the repeated parts may naturally differ from each other, so there’s no need to “humanize” anything

2. When user doesn’t have other midi equipment, it’s also cool to have chains for variations. If we imagine that switching between patterns won’t reset currently chained variations to start from the beginning, it could introduce layered playback. Like, you could make a progression within variations and then switch patterns being somewhere in the middle.

3. In case we have “Variation randomizer”, it would be quite expected to have a regular chained playback with no wizardry.

btw, check the references to other products section I’ve added.