Polyrhythm - any better way?

Miles Davies's icon

Here is my polyrhythm hubcentre patch which I use as a starting point for building some of my sequencers. Has anyone got an alternative to this type of thing?

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

willum070's icon

That's really cool. I did a little sequencer that is vaguely similar. The part that I don't like about it is the tendency for notes to hit on the same beat. I thought maybe a step sequencer input for notes would be fun but that ended up not working very well. I was considering adding swing or delay to further improve it. I thought perhaps the train object at

1074.neur0.2.amxd
amxd
Miles Davies's icon

@willum070 I dont have m4l or live for that matter. Have you this in a max 5 patch?

willum070's icon

Certainly!

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Roald Baudoux's icon

Well, IMHO the problem with polyrhythms was to be able to edit all the tracks in a single view, so I took some time to program something in Javascript for the JSUI object so I could build a specific user interface (see picture).

So every track has a layer for pitches (color lines) and velocities (black bars). Keyboard shortcurts allow to change either pitch or velocity and move step by step or faster. You can set the number of beats per pattern from 1 to where it becomes impossible to edit and where MIDI becomes the bottleneck (especially in Max 5), like say 100 beats.

Specific messages allow to transpose pitches, edit velocities, clear either or both.

Each pattern can store its own tempo too.

I have 8 such objects in a bpatcher and the data are put in a coll object because JS is too slow when it comes to read the data (especially with fast rhythms).

The playback is controlled by a phasor~ to keep everything in sync and MIDI messages are sent outside.

Roald Baudoux

1084.js_polyrhythmic_engine.png
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