Working with Hardware: Livid’s Code

• application
• code
• hardware
• livid
• sequencer

If you wanted to make the note player more robust, you could use more complex programming for the output scaling, or you could build a secondary grid system for note selection. In this case, though, I just wanted a sequencer that would work simply and musically, so I went down the path that I did. To tidy up the patch before I begin the next section, I again encapsulate everything specific to the note generation and end up with a tight little patch:

Creating the Gate Subsystem

What we have now is a pretty credible step sequencer – 64 notes that play based off of a 4×8 grid of rotary controls, and all coerced into a nice little pentatonic scale. But there are two parts of the hardware that we can use to make it even more interesting: the per-step LED, and the push-button switch built into the rotary controller. What we will do is to use the switch to set the gate for each step, allowing us to make more interesting phrases from our step sequences.

The switches are MIDI note producers, using the note numbers that match the rotary controller numbers. The LEDs are note-receivers, following the same note number map. So grabbing the incoming note information (and sending note information) will allow us to manage the entire gating grid.

The output of the switches is [note number, velocity], where the velocity is 64 if pushed down, and 0 if released. Since we don’t want to have to hold down an encoder to hear a step, we need to change this functionality into a toggle-like output. Probably the easiest way to do this is to literally use a toggle object, looking for a velocity of 64 as an indication of a switch press. We also need to turn the LED on or off based on the toggle value. Thus, we make a little fixture that we can use for each row’s grid system.

Now, if we use four of these fixtures for the four rows of the Code, we have a grid system ready to go. We need to connect it to the clocking system we created earlier, and we should be able to get gates out as the sequencer steps through the 64 stages. The last thing we need to do is to route the output to the MIDI note producer, so that only steps with their gates on will be output.

Finally, we wrap this up into another encapsulation (subpatcher), add a few comments, and we have a top-level patch that is simple and ready to use:

Again, there are many ways that you could expand this sequencer: you could add a preset system, you could find a way to control the tempo with the hardware, or you could build in a system to select specific steps during performance.
In our next article, we are going to turn to Peter Nyboer, the chief programmer at Livid Instruments, to take the hardware connection even further. In the meantime, use, expand and tear apart this patch, and have a blast!