By Gooooose
It is true that grid and quantisation are great tools for making electronic music, however, many times we might want to make something moving in a more interesting way. These patterns might not be used in the production immediately, but many times they will bring unpredictable results or inspirations. However, apart from generating interesting results, pure randomness could also bring uncontrollable chaos, meaning although musicians might benefit from the inspiring side, they also have to spend quite a lot of time to make it meaningful, or semi-repetitive.
To make the life of curious electronic musicians easier, the GRIDLESS sequencer is made. In the core of the sequencer, it iss an FM synthesiser. The generated waveform will send out 6 different triggers in each cycle, and each trigger’s position (trig-pos), pitch, velocity and note length could be specified. Any incoming midi note will pass the device, and also reset the waveform, to generate a repetitive pattern. Through adjusting the frequency of the carrier and modulator, along with the modulation index, a nearly infinite list of waveforms could be generated, and each waveform could be considered as a rhythmic pattern.
After loading GRIDLESS into any track, simply run Ableton will start the sequencer, and it will stop running when Ableton live is stopped. A simple oscilloscope will run in the background of the main GUI, to indicate the device is running, also provide a reference for the waveform generated.
SYNC vs FREERUN:
If no midi note is sent to GRIDLESS, it will keep free running, meaning the waveform will continue cycle and generate pattern that repeat at the same time with the period of the waveform. A midi note at the head of each bar will reset the waveform, thus generate rhythmic pattern that will repeat every bar. Any incoming note will restart the pattern.
