Randomising notes in key.

Max's icon

I'm looking to create a button that will generate random patterns of notes, however I only want certain pitches to play.
I don't want to use select as this means that the bang could result in no sound several times in a row.

Here's what i have so far:

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

Also how would i go about making this trigger notes from an electric piano in logic rather than the rubbish sounding built in sounds?

brendan mccloskey's icon

Hi Max
two objects (at least) will apply here: [coll] or [multislider]; fill your [coll] with predetermined pitches and then query the list with a [random]. Alternatively, a [multislider], with number of pitches on the X axis and pitch number on the Y axis will also do this - in this case you need to use a [fetch] message I think (check the helpfile).

Brendan

Nikolas K's icon

hello Max,
when you say certain notes, you mean a certain scale? like the notes of G major?

Max's icon

basically i want to be able to turn it on by pressing the toggle and it play random notes from a ceratain scale yes. In my case D blues (D, F, G, G#, A, C)

i tried the coll object but i can't for the life of my work it out. been playing with it for about half an hour now lol read all the help files =(

Max's icon

I found an arpeggiator patch on another forum that looks like this. It works but only if the notes are permanently held down. This is obviously not practical when i'm trying to trigger other samples to perform a track with my patch. Could it be somehow adapted?

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

brendan mccloskey's icon

Here's a patch of mine that populates [coll] with user-defined pitches, then randomizes the output.

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

Brendan

Max's icon

thanks Brendan that works great =)

Chris Muir's icon

I have a patcher called ScaleMaster that is sort of a general note quantizer / scale generator. It's probably overkill for what you want, but I thought I should mention it. http://xfade.com/max/

Max's icon

the link doesn't work =/

brendan mccloskey's icon

I have Chris' excellent patch if you need it.........

Max's icon

I'd love to take a look =)

brendan mccloskey's icon

Here it is:

2118.ScaleMaster.zip
zip
Max's icon

thank you =)

Max's icon

not going to lie.. completely baffled by that lol. You have clearly been doing this for a long time. Looks awesome but I'm just totally overwhelmed by it all.

Chris Muir's icon

(Weird that my site isn't loading. Other sites hosted on the same machine are working.)

Max, let's just say that with ScaleMaster, I tried to be… um… "comprehensive." I don't think that it's that hard to use, though. Just copy everything that's in the reddish "Database" panel of ScaleMaster into your patcher. Once that is done, you can use the abstractions NoteQuantizeSimple_BP, NoteQuantize_MIDI_BP or NoteQuantizeDegree_BP. If you use them as bpatchers, you get a menu of scales to choose from.

Max's icon

You're probably right but considering I started using MaxMSP about 5 days ago I'm still a bit of a novice and probably only know a fraction of the objects and their functions.

I'll give it a go and see how I get on.

Thanks a lot for all the help, this is a really great community. I've had endless problems solved by people here within hours if not minutes.