@alkman Okay, I just want to say that this is a powerful and interesting tool and I will get a wide variety of uses out of it in the future. The design/user interface is great and it is an excellent way to visualize the concept of what's going on, and alkman does great work all around (I HIGHLY recommend all of his other stuff on here for whatever that's worth). Having said that, there are a few points that I wanted to bring up.
First of all, the description specifically mentions polyrhythms which was a big reason I bought it. I was hoping that this could do those right out of the gate, with appropriate parameters inputted in of course. This is something that Live doesn't directly do, which is disappointing, but there are workarounds that you can use such as directly entering/manipulating/warping the MIDI notes (which results in crude/coarse timing) or using overdubbing with the stock arpeggiator in time mode (which requires some math for every polyrhythm desired, but I do find it personally hilarious that I have a disdain for doing that given the styles of music that I listen to/produce/write that require polyrhythms in the first place). After playing around with this for about a dozen hours over about two days, I have discovered that this is not the case with the Euclidean Sequencer. I would say that instead of doing straight-up polyrhythms in sync with the global time signature, it will do polymeters instead. While I can't make it do polyrhythms directly, you have to set it to the polymeter that reflects the intended polyrhythm (5 over 4 in 4/4 at 120bpm to get a 5:4 polyrhythm, for instance), print the MIDI to a track, and then warp it by hand from a phrase/clip length of five beats to four beats. This still puts you at the mercy of Ableton's quantizing, grid snapping, and note-length resolution limitations, however I will say that the end result sounds a bit cleaner than doing it all yourself manually. I guess I was hoping for something for straightforward that could be setup and run to achieve that goal without breaking the creative flow for that specific issue.
After doing some reading of the previous comments from the graciously helpful creator and the supplied paper on Euclidean rhythms, I don't know if this is even a valid feature to request but I would love to see it included. I dunno, but will confess that I am Max ignorant and not a programmer of any kind. I will also freely admit that maybe my expectations based on the description and the video demo may not have necessarily conformed to the actual reality of the tool, though.
Aside from that, saving and loading patches isn't working for me (Live 10.1.14 and Max 8.15), same with parameters resetting to initialized when saving and loading a Live set. I personally would also really like to see if there could be an option (like the random or shuffle buttons) for setting all sequencer note pitches per channel to the same note, like a C3 for the whole blue channel, etc. I've also found that if you use a MIDI effect rack with several channels after it, each with a stock MIDI pitch effect at different "accepted note range" settings, you can then route multiple instruments/MIDI channels to each colored channel, at which point you can do some wild stuff (I had a Mick Gordon/Doom 2016 thing going for a minute, which was dope). Also, if this device was ever at a point where you could use it to assign parameters on other effects and instruments to modulate, I would fear for the dryness and structural integrity of my jeans.
All in all, it's excellent and I would say 10 out of 10 for what it can do, but not what I was expecting going in. I would say that if you need what it can do, it's definitely worth the money. Thanks and I am looking forward to whatever you do in the future.
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First of all, the description specifically mentions polyrhythms which was a big reason I bought it. I was hoping that this could do those right out of the gate, with appropriate parameters inputted in of course. This is something that Live doesn't directly do, which is disappointing, but there are workarounds that you can use such as directly entering/manipulating/warping the MIDI notes (which results in crude/coarse timing) or using overdubbing with the stock arpeggiator in time mode (which requires some math for every polyrhythm desired, but I do find it personally hilarious that I have a disdain for doing that given the styles of music that I listen to/produce/write that require polyrhythms in the first place). After playing around with this for about a dozen hours over about two days, I have discovered that this is not the case with the Euclidean Sequencer. I would say that instead of doing straight-up polyrhythms in sync with the global time signature, it will do polymeters instead. While I can't make it do polyrhythms directly, you have to set it to the polymeter that reflects the intended polyrhythm (5 over 4 in 4/4 at 120bpm to get a 5:4 polyrhythm, for instance), print the MIDI to a track, and then warp it by hand from a phrase/clip length of five beats to four beats. This still puts you at the mercy of Ableton's quantizing, grid snapping, and note-length resolution limitations, however I will say that the end result sounds a bit cleaner than doing it all yourself manually. I guess I was hoping for something for straightforward that could be setup and run to achieve that goal without breaking the creative flow for that specific issue.
After doing some reading of the previous comments from the graciously helpful creator and the supplied paper on Euclidean rhythms, I don't know if this is even a valid feature to request but I would love to see it included. I dunno, but will confess that I am Max ignorant and not a programmer of any kind. I will also freely admit that maybe my expectations based on the description and the video demo may not have necessarily conformed to the actual reality of the tool, though.
Aside from that, saving and loading patches isn't working for me (Live 10.1.14 and Max 8.15), same with parameters resetting to initialized when saving and loading a Live set. I personally would also really like to see if there could be an option (like the random or shuffle buttons) for setting all sequencer note pitches per channel to the same note, like a C3 for the whole blue channel, etc. I've also found that if you use a MIDI effect rack with several channels after it, each with a stock MIDI pitch effect at different "accepted note range" settings, you can then route multiple instruments/MIDI channels to each colored channel, at which point you can do some wild stuff (I had a Mick Gordon/Doom 2016 thing going for a minute, which was dope). Also, if this device was ever at a point where you could use it to assign parameters on other effects and instruments to modulate, I would fear for the dryness and structural integrity of my jeans.
All in all, it's excellent and I would say 10 out of 10 for what it can do, but not what I was expecting going in. I would say that if you need what it can do, it's definitely worth the money. Thanks and I am looking forward to whatever you do in the future.