Any other classic Arpeggiator than JJ Clark?

torsig1967

I know the NM G1 has limited capabilities for building arpeggiators. I've looked at JJ Clarks well known 1 octave Korg Monololy style arpeggiator. It's quite good but very limited.

Has anyone ever suceeded to do a more powerful arpeggiator for NM G1? Preferably one that resembles a classic arpeggiator, not some random note player. I've looked through a lot of patches with the word "arp" but most of them are not so useful.

Any ideas?

Kassen · Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2006 6:18 am Post subject:

I could build you one but since there are no busses it'll only be able to detect two keyboard keys held.

not now though but perhaps in the weekend.

torsig1967 · Posted: Fri Mar 31, 2006 12:37 pm Post subject:

Kassen · Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2006 7:23 am Post subject:

Well, in that case I have some bad news.

Last night I did some work on this because I had a few minutes to kill at Rob's place. I ended up complaining that this sort of thing turns your brain inside out, I also had to explain to Rob what it was that the stuff I had patched so far was doing (that's quite rare).

So; I think I could get this done for two notes but it's NOT going to be simple or easy to understand. This stuff is bitch to program. I'm sorry about that but if it were easy or simple then it probably wouldn't have been so hard for you to find example patches....

torsig1967 · Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2006 8:17 am Post subject:

No problem, I had the feeling it's quite difficult.

I have made some progress on my own now and constructed all subpatches but one for an arpeggiator that I believe can manage more than 2 notes.

The subpatch I'm having trouble with is a patch that can keep track of how many notes I'm holding down. If I press lets say three notes, it works but if I release one of them I don't know how to capture this.

What I need is something to detect note off. How could I do this?

In a monophonic patch I'll just get one note off (negative edge on gate) since the others are considered silenced. In a polyphonic patch each note off is routed to it's own instance which makes it impossible to count or am I missing something.

And the most difficult thing, how to "know" which note is realased.

Well if I solve this I might get a rather clever arpeggiator.

Kassen · Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2006 2:39 pm Post subject:

Yeah, well, that's one of the most tricky ones....

I was out this weekend so I didn't work on this but I did come up with a new angle I'll try soon.

torsig1967 · Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2006 2:08 pm Post subject:

Well, I finished my arpeggiator sucessfully and posted it in a separate thread. It's not really a classic arpeggiator since I couldn't solve the "which key was released" issue and also it's not playing "lowest note first".

But it has some other nice features instead and I know I will be happy with it live.

Kassen: Even if you don't have time to finish yours, thanks anyway. If you have a hint on how to solve the "which key was released" issue then let me know.

blue hell · Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2006 2:54 pm Post subject:

For patch screendump etc. of the patch mentioned above see http://electro-music.com/forum/post-73472.html

Kassen · Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2006 8:30 pm Post subject:

Hmmmmm, well, I gave it another go with a new method that should theoretically be able to do three or four voices with gates and note-off but it turns out not everything that I thought got flushed at note-on actually does get flushed and I was trying to extract meaning from that....

Either that or the editor is not displaying what is actually going on.

Anyway; another strategy could be multiplexing three signals into each of the poly=>fx area busses (three cv and three gates) then de-multiplexing them at the other end. This depends on each of the voices having some unique ID which can be created by making them count haw many notes have passed since they were "born". Another thing it depends on is each of the voices as well as the fx area having some signal that's identical yet independantly generated. For this I thought I'd use a little counter that I reset each time the midi clock went "click". The trick is to only make individual voices speak to the busses when it's their "turn". This can be expressed in something like counting pulses of something very fast since the last midi clock click.

Then we would bubble-sort the three cv values high to low and after that sort it wouldn't matter anymore that a voice that keeps sounding would change it's position in the multiplexing order. After that it's not so hard anymore.

However; my editor is currently displaying a sequencer that counts down from three every time I hit the key if I keep repeating the same key. That could just be a artefact of a single display being unable to display three voices at the same time, however none of the three steps will actually trigger a test "drum osc" if I try to make them do that.

-----
Hmmmm. I just requested 6 voices and now it looks like it's counting down from 6... and none of the steps actually trigger.

This, to me, looks like a exceptionally good reason to give up. Have a good night.

torsig1967 · Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 3:45 am Post subject:

I think I understand how you mean it should work but you're on NM G2, right? I'm still on NM G1 so I don't have busses for CV and Gate.

Anyway, I'll get a G2 soon so I guess I'll give it a try then.

Kassen · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 5:56 pm Post subject:

Nah, all of this was pure NM "G1" rack, on the G2 I would aproach it quite differently. I was using the two channels that go between the poly and mono areas as "busses". Anything that can take audio can also take cv and gate signals, you see. I called them "busses" because they were dealing with different data coming from seperate sources. Ideally they should actually add those sources in my patch as such since only one voice was intended to "talk" at any one time but this ran into issues. Issues of a sort that I don't realy feel like solving because it hurt my head, there seem to be bugs there and It's not realy worth it because there are fine external arpegiators too that would serve.

If you want to keep it up then I hope my notes have at least brought some new angles... I don't think it's worth the trouble and headaches, all things considered.

torsig1967 · Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 2:57 am Post subject:

OK, thanks.

I've come to a similar conclusion, it's seems to be nearly impossible to create a classic arpeggiator. We'll I guess one could do it with note detect but it seems to take so much CPU in the end that there's nothing left for making sounds.

My G2X arrived this weekend and there I have my arpeggiator! It was fun exploring this but I give up. I have my G2X for arpeggiator things now.

Kassen · Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 3:34 pm Post subject:

I still think custom arpegiators are very worthwhile things.

If you considder chords on a acoustical guitar; those are basically arpegios of a rather unique sort. With a custom arpegiator you could do that sort of thing in a way adapted to your own sounds.

I don't think it's that usefull to build one that covers the sort of thing the internal G2 one covers because plenty exist already but once you have that you can make it go guitar style and so on which is where it all becomes usefull again.