The Covert Seq – Creating patterns and Presets from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

The Covert Operators and Bjorn Vayner have become my favorite go-to source for wild Ableton Live hacks. And even before the release of Max for Live, Bjorn has built some terrific, simple step-sequencers using Live’s Racks feature. That’s just the Racks feature – no Max patches or hidden features anywhere to be found. Sure, I suppose the clip view itself can be seen as a kind of step sequencer, but this gives you a unique way of generating sequences.

If you just want to begin playing with step sequencing in Live, Bjorn has a new download, aptly called The Covert Sequencer, as seen in the video at top. It’s free, it’s fun, it celebrates the 5th Anniversary of Covert Ops and the 10th of Ableton Live (good grief!), and it’s all voodoo built with dummy clips and MIDI effects.

Full post, downloads, and video tutorials:
The Covert Seq [The Covert Operators]

If you want to try your hand at the ninja skills behind all of this, Bjorn posted a screencast back in August revealing his secrets:

What happens when you put all the digital and electronic tools you love together into one groove session? I expect it probably looks something like this video. Welcome to the new digital music age: DIY electronics, vintage digital tech (Game Boys), and modern computer tech (Monome as Arduinome clone, Max/MSP, and shiny MacBook) all coexist. And a fair bit of what you see if a modern hybrid of old and new paradigms, like the thoroughly modernized Tracker Renoise. Thomas Margolf says “Greetings from Rotterdam” and writes,

We made a first Jam using the new GorF step-sequencer, Arduinome, max msp patch ‘Soyuz’, a Gameboy running LittleSoundDJ, LSDJMC2 Gameboy Midi-Interface, Renoise, Ableton Live and a Nord Micro-Modular. It’s the first session with a fresh soldered GorF.

Lovely stuff. Keep on soldering and jammin’, folks. Okay, tagging this story is going to take … a lot of tags.

I ask you: what is the foundation for rhythmic electronic music? I suggest that the humble step-sequencer is the backbone of many of today’s musical genres and memetic evolutions. To have electronic rhythm, you need to start with a clock and go from there, dividing it into fractions and multiples. Then start assigning sounds to those divisions and you’re pretty much there- techno is happening.

I’ve been working on prototyping a sequencer-synth and in doing research, I’ve come across numerous projects that tackle this idea with great enthusiasm. Because a sequencer can drive any type of electronics, projects tend to fall into two categories: audio, or visual. Additionally, I’m seeing two main drivers for the sequence itself: the nimble arduino, and the CMOS 4017 Decade counter IC. I’ll survey here some of the finished projects to give an idea of what’s possible. Come with me, won’t you, on an exploration of the world of DIY sequencers.

You buy a box. You unwrap the box. You plug it in. You read the manual to learn what it does. Or you bring a box home, and meanwhile a community of people – possibly including you – works to imagine new possibilities for what the box can do and share them with each other. It’s clear that the idea of open hardware (free hardware?) has a lot of potential. But it’s a matter of finding products that realize that vision. And today alone, I’ve got a lot of good news on that front.

There’s some wonderfully good news for fans of DIY music tech. And the homebrewed, open, hackable tools often outshine commercially-available options. For developers, they’re a change to hack on something, but they serve as end-user products, too. The GorF step sequencer and minicommand — the latter tough to describe but a sort of do-everything magical box o’ MIDI — are each nearing shipment, complete with preorders. And the folks at BUG Labs have added sound capabilities, which is already turning into some interesting prototypes of alternative mobile music devices.

Back-to-Basics, DIY Step Sequencer Kit

The GorF step sequencer appeared in a video demo a few weeks ago. But if you were intrigued by the YouTube rendition of GorF, the time to get your own is nearing. PCBs have arrived and, in a DIY Valentine’s Day present, there’s a poll about interest.

Black Box Performer

GorF is impressive, and I like its elegant, simple step interface. But the tool that’s been really blowing my mind is the minicommand. At first, it looks like just a simple, compact controller – nice knobs, and a screen you can customize. That’s all well and good. But the minicommand is better understood as a do-everything, magical black box. Programmable with the Arduino environment, the minicommand can become a controller, an arpeggiator, a Euclidian polyrhythm maker… out of the box, it’ll already have a ton of firmware tools, alone. Maker wesen writes:

The creator of the wonderful glitchDS, repeaterDS, and cellDS Nintendo homebrew music apps has turned his sights to the free and open coding-for-artists desktop tool Processing. The result: a drum machine that mutates and morphs in wonderful ways via a command-line interface. (I almost put the command line bit in the headline, but while I actually adore command lines, I think the more interesting part of it is the way it mutates its patterns in lovely ways. No boring endless step sequence repeat here.)

The tool is called Quotile, and since it is built in Processing and the code is entirely free, you’re welcome to try it out and change it around if you like! Apparently the Mac camp are having some troubles, but I don’t see any reason it shouldn’t work on Mac; the problem is generally that getting Java MIDI running on Mac has some tricky bits because Apple dropped support for the Java MIDI API, even though it’s a standard part of the Java platform. In this case, I expect it’s the library’s reliance on mmj or people having trouble installing that MIDI subsystem that’s the culprit. Keep the faith: it can work, and I hope we can get a standard, reliable MIDI library soon.

The sound source above: Machinedrum, of course.

I’ll give this a try on Linux later today, on the platform that I think has the best MIDI support, hands-down – yes, even compared to the Mac. (I’ll explain why I think that soon.)

Speaking of MIDI libraries, the Processing library this is based on is a new one called MIDI Bus. It’s very similar to wesen’s rwmidi, which we’ve covered before.

The project:
Quotile – new PC MIDI sequencer written in Processing at glitchDS

The free library for Processing (Mac + Windows + Linux)
Small But Digital – themidibus

Previous musical creations in Processing:
Strange, New Musical Interfaces, Built in Processing
DIY 3D Controller: Inspired by Theremin, Powered by Arduino, Processing
Tiction: Animated, Nodal Generative Music App in Progress, in Processing
Build Your Own Game of Life Sequencer in Processing: Video Featuring rwmidi
Help! I’m Trapped in an Acid-Colored Wash of a Thousand General MIDI Pianos!
Spaces and Roots: Manipulating Sound with Processing + Touch, Tangible Interfaces