Step sequencer for echo delay time...

Now if this was a YouTube channel, then I might well be posting videos with click-bait titles in an ongoing quest for subscribers (or publicising an amazing device like the Rebel Technology 'Witch'!). 

But this is a blog, and I'm happy to post anything I do, that might be useful, which is why there's an eclectic mix of topics on here. And yes, I know that I haven't covered MaxForLive for a while, and there's a very good reason for that. 

Anyway, here's a little bit of fun that might be useful to some of you, or could serve as inspiration for further exploration. I'm almost tempted to post a version on YouTube with a Click-Bait-oriented title just to see what happens... 'Expression Sequencing - What you need to know!' 

Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash

Step Sequencing

Okay, I admit, I've been a fan of step sequencers since seeing Tangerine Dream back in the 70s at the Liverpool Empire. Dry ice clouds, mist curtains, mirror balls, CO2 lasers, guitar solos from Edgar Froese and just one or two step sequences - it was quite an experience. Since then, I have acquired a few hardware step sequencers (a Zaquencer, for instance - very nice!), and programmed a few (several in MaxForLive, for example), but my latest acquisition is a little bit different: a mix of old school (8 steps!) and new-ish school (MIDI Clock sync!). But not a Eurorack module - nope, this is a 'guitar' pedal. 

Now, I was raised on Electro-Harmonix pedals (I always wanted an Electric Mistress Flanger!) and I've gradually been getting a few modern examples, purely for research purposes, you understand. The 'pedal' in this case is on the borders of the pedal-world - it is the 8 Step Program: a CV/Expression sequencer. 

Sequencers in pedals are quite unusual, or at least, from my limited viewpoint, that seems to be the case. The Strymon 'Night Sky' has a sequencer to ty and liven up the shimmer reverb, is one example, and I'm not immediately familiar with any other examples. Of course, with thousands of pedal manufacturers and hundreds of pedals released every month (week? day? hour? minute?), then there could well be many other examples, but I'm beginning to think that it is not humanly possible to keep up with pedal releases any longer. Although, if anyone can, it would be Josh Scott of JHS Pedals...

Actually, the step sequencer that I'm talking about is quite unusual, even in a world where unusual and rare seems to be the starting point for a product, and you probably need endorsements by several online influencers just to rise above the lowest levels of noise and avoid being totally ignored. Electro-Harmonix do not shy away from making radically 'different' pedals, and they have a huge range, plus a long and fascinating history. 

Anyway, the '8 Step Program' is s step sequencer for Expression Pedal control signals.

My EHX 8-Step Program pedal!

You read that correctly. Whilst it can also output control voltages (from 0 (zero Volts) to 5Volts), it is mostly intended to act as an automatic Expression Pedal, so instead of you having to move your foot from heel to toe on an Expression Pedal, then the 8 Step Program will do it for you, repeatedly if you prefer, at a user-variable rate, or you can advance through the steps manually, or just trigger a One-shot single run-through. At the borders of 'step sequencing', there is also the ability to select steps at random, which always sounds more like a slow random noise generator to me, although it outputs a very structured type of noise where the levels are known, but when they will occur is not known.  I'm going to step away from this topic before any 'unknown unknowns' are mentioned!

Oh, before I forget, sincere thanks to Andertons for managing to procure me an '8 Step Program' on special order. It is definitely worth the wait!

Ubiquity or Not

Lots of guitar pedals have a socket marked 'Exp' or 'Expr'. Not all pedals have them, and for those that do, there are at least two different ways to wire the socket (and the pedals) in common usage (see this blog post...). So not quite ubiquitous, but certainly widely available. As that previous blog post rather gives away, I'm one of those people who likes to use a foot pedal to change one or more parameters on a pedal, and so I have 'one or two' Expression Pedals'. 

I've always been confused by the naming convention for guitar pedals, and that ignores the weirdness that you can use them with things other than guitars! One of the first pedals I ever bought was a Colorsound Wah-wah pedal (Not this modern re-creation and not from Macari's, but way older and from somewhere else, lost in the fog of time...) and this was indeed, a pedal. There was a bit that you put your foot on and moved it, and it changed the sound, and it looked like a sort of hi-tech equivalent of the pedal that my Mum used to control her sewing machine. So my mind is forever locked into the mind-set that a pedal is a thing that you move (heel and toe positions, plus in-between) with your foot. A foot-pedal. A Guitar foot-pedal. 

But then there was another type of guitar pedal, and it didn't have a wobbly bit on top where you put your foot. Instead it had one (and sometimes more!) push switch that made a metallic snicking sound when you pushed it - and this turned the effect on or off. Bypass was the word - on or off. To change the effect, you turned small rotary controls - too small and awkwardly placed for your foot, of course. Most of the foot-switches were chrome cathedrals of mechanical complexity, but there were also ones with black plastic tops that didn't have the same satisfying metallic clunk, and which were apparently notorious for 'going wrong'. Nowadays, I only ever see the all-metal variety of foot switch, so I imagine that the plastic-top ones have died out. 

When there are two things that are different but share the same name, then confusion is not far away. As I said earlier, I've always been confused by guitar pedals: some of which have a foot pedal, and some of which don't, but they are still called pedals. Expression Pedals, which don't process audio at all, and only control other guitar pedals, via a TRS or 'stereo' cable, are a third type of pedal again. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to try and persuade me that there are three types of totally different device, all called the same, where:

- one device processes audio

- one device processes audio, and has a pedal that your foot moves

- one device does not process audio at all, but controls a device that does process audio.

 And these are all Pedals?

Sequencing...

Let's look at what you can use Expression for. That Colorsound Wah-Wah pedal is a good starting point. The foot pedal bit changes the audio that passes through the Wah-Wah pedal - it's a band-pass filter where the centre frequency of the filter is controlled by the foot pedal that your foot moves. The sound is a rough approximation to the band-pass filter that your mouth makes when you open and close it. Try saying 'wah wah wah...' and see how your jaw moves, your mouth opens and your lips move. If you say 'Waaaooouuuw' then your mouth, lips and jaw will all be moving a lot! 

Take a moment here to let the skin on your face return to normal after all that stretching...

Auto-Wah removes the foot pedal and replaces it with an LFO - a Low Frequency Oscillator. A circuit that wobbles something - in this case, the wah-wah effect. So the centre frequency of that band-pass filter wobbles up and down in frequency, and you don't wear out your foot or ankle by moving the pedal back and forth all the time. So the foot pedal bit has gone, and we have just a 'Bypass' switch to turn the effect on or off. 

Of course, some Auto-wah pedals have Expression inputs, and if you connect an Expression Pedal into that input, then you have a foot pedal that controls another pedal!  So if you don't want repeated Wah-Wahs at the rate set by the LFO, then you can use the Expression (foot) pedal to do the 'wah'ing yourself, at whatever rate you want. 

The 8 Step is like an Expression pedal, except that it doesn't have a foot pedal bit that you move with your foot: instead it has 8 linear slider controls that are activated in turn by an LFO. So you get up to 8 different settings of a non-existent foot pedal, sent down a TRS 'stereo' cable, to another pedal where those settings affect the audio. 

If you really want to blow your mind, then the 8 Step Program also has an input for... an Expression Pedal!

Wah, not wah...

I haven't been using the 8 Step Program to control Wah-wah effects. I've been playing with Echo Units or Delay Lines - audio boxes that apply echo or delay to audio signals. Small cyclical changes to the delay/echo time produce flanging, chorus, tremolo, vibrato and other 'Modulation'-type effects, but sudden jerky changes have a very different effect - they change the rhythm of the echoes. If you change the timing of echoes or delays with a Step Sequencer, then you get a sequence of different rhythmic echoes. It's an interesting and unusual effect - particularly because it doesn't settle down into a fixed rhythm. The echoes are always changing, and if the rate of the Step Sequencer (in the 8 Step Program) is not synchronised to the timing of whatever audio you are processing (a drum machine, or groovebox, or a synth playing a sequence, then the two different rates should drift past each other, and you should get 'skying', where things gradually change in a way that is beguiling, non-repetitive, and addictive.

So, above is the setup. The 'Expression' control signal goes along the TRS 'stereo' cable from the 8 Step Program device to the Echo pedal, and inside the Echo pedal, the Expression is mapped to control the delay time. The 8 Step Program's 8 numbered 'step' sliders are set to a rising stepped 'sawtooth' type of waveform, and the Rate slider on the 8 Step Program is set so that each step is close to one repetition of a drum pattern or a sequenced synth line. 

The results are 8 different patterns of syncopated echoes, because the steps from the 8 Step Program give the equivalent of 8 different settings of the 'virtual expression pedal' that the 8 Step Program is emulating.  Unlike a human being, the 8 Step Program reproduces those 8 steps more or less exactly the same each time, and so it is possible to really hear the 8 different patterns cycling through. Best of all, the Rate slider of the 8 Step Program and the audio clocks are not in sync, and so the patterns gradually change as predicted. 

What I haven't checked out yet is to use a MIDI Clock to do the exact opposite: put the 8 Step Program and the audio into sync. Even when I do, then there is still scope for additional experimentation. The 8 Step Program allows the number of steps in the sequence to be changed, so the length could be set to 7 steps instead of 8. This would mean that even though the 8 Step Program, I mean the '7 Step Program', and the audio drum machine or synth sequencer are in sync, there is a 7:8 ratio of timing, and so they will drift or slip against each other, and so they will generate long repeating patterns that last over many bars. So that is ratios of 1: 8 through to 7:8, plus 8:, which is in sync.

The 8 Step Program also allows the step sequence to run in Reverse (which isn't going to be very different - the patterns will just be different), and in Bounce mode, where the steps go back and forth from 1 to 8 to 1 to 8 etc., scanner-style. Now this 'bouncing' is 15 steps in length, which means that we can have ratios of 9:8 through to 15:8. There's quite a lot to play with here.

There's one final mode for the step sequence., and that is Random, where the steps are not output in sequence, but at random. So after step 1, then any of steps 1 to 8 could follow. This will again give 8 different syncopated echo patterns, but they won't be in any order, and so there will be less obvious patterning for a human being to detect - plus the patterns will not repeat after the same number of bars each time, because the patterns are selected randomly. Again, there is lots of scope for exploration here.

Other devices... 

I've always liked Echo as an effect, but any pedal with an Expression input socket can be used with the EHX 8 Step Program. So Reverb, Flanging, Phasing, Tremolo, even Wah-wah could all be controlled using the 8 Step Program. And all of this complexity and syncopation is totally DAWless!

The 8 Step output is also a Control Voltage (CV), and so with a 1/4 inch jack to 3.5 mm jack, could be used to control Eurorack modulars. In fact, the Expression Pedal input of the 8 Step Program can be used to control parameters like Rate, Depth, Glide (You can set how quickly the steps go from one to the next - a bit like Portamento on a keyboard..) and Sequence Length, as well as a Clock input, so there are many more interfacing options there with modular synths. 

MIDI-wise the 8 Step Program has full MIDI Control over programs of steps, plus all the parameters.  Future investigation for me...

Summary

The Electro-Harmonix 8 Step Program is just a small pedal, but there are lots of ways of using it in a DAWless setup to do things which will sound complex, syncopated and yet, can have the unpredictability, drifting and all of the unexpected serendipity of analogue modular. Using the 8 Step Program to drift through some syncopation delay effects from a DAW output might also change some opinions about the inherent boring repetition that you get with a DAW. I'm wondering if there is scope for a contest where people compete to fool a panel of judges with their DAWless or DAW systems... Now that sounds like an interesting event for a synthesizer booth type gathering!

So you can hear how all this sounds, there's a YouTube version of this blog article on... YouTube!  There are only a couple of examples, but I'm sure that you can come up with your own. Just tell EHX or  Andertons that I sent you when you get your own 8 Step Program!

The EHX page for the 8 Step Program lets you download the manual, which is full of loads of details about what it can do. Please try not to drool onto your screen...

(Note that I bought the EHX 8 Step Program with my own money, from Andertons. This blog post was not sponsored by EHX or Andertons. I just buy stuff from them because I like them!)

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DAWless or Ableton Live Only - Inspired by a Ricky Tinez YouTube Video

There are a lot of electronic music resources available on YouTube, and some of the best, in my humble opinion, are the videos published by Ricky Tinez on his channel:

It was a video from Ricky published on the 4th of January 2020 that caught my attention recently, and it inspired a series of exploratory experiments. The video starts out by looking at the 1010 Music Blackbox sample player (and more - almost any short description is going to be a total understatement of what that box can do...), but it segues into a live jamming session using Ricky's live-performance-oriented modular synthesizer, where he syncopates a melody line, and uses rhythmic timbre variation to give a compelling groove with lots of easily accessible variations.

Ricky's video uses the 'live performance, hardware only: no computer' buzz-word 'DAWless', which got me wondering if you could do something similar in Ableton Live 10 Suite, because I'm a contrariwise sort of person. As even more of a challenge, I wondered what would be possible without using Max For Live, because my immediate thought was that I could program up a Max For Live plug-in to do a lot of the rhythmic control. (I'm using the 'Suite' edition of Live because I like and use the software instrument plug-ins a lot, but you could easily replace them with VSTs or samples via Simpler, the sample player included in the Standard and Lite editions of Ableton Live.)

Limitations are the spur of creativity. That's what they always tell you in moments of desperation - like when the only sound source you have is a referee's whistle and you have to produce a TV soundtrack. So by deliberately limiting myself to the factory presets in Ableton Live 10 Suite and with no Max For Live, I was removing all of my usual 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards. Well, prop-less and some time later, I'm pleased to report that a DAW can produce some interesting emulations of some of the workflows that you would normally associate with a small modular synth. That strange whooshing sound that you can hear is me swimming against the tide, because this is the opposite of 'DAWless' - more like 'DAW Only'.

There's a YouTube video that shows a screen capture of me showing the results here (and I have made the Ableton Live .als file available for download as well). I'm going to follow approximately the same flow as the video in this blog post...

DAW Only

I started with a basic drum underpinning using the factory 'Core 808' drum kit the comes with Ableton Live 10, followed by a factory reverb, and just in case, a factory Auto-Filter that I might use later to give some variation to the drum sound (As it turned out, I didn't need to do this, but the effect is there, ready and waiting if I do ever need it.).

The drum pattern itself is not sophisticated, and is a single bar, repeated - for tech demos then I think the detail should only be where you need it.

The bass line is just more underpinning, and is just four notes, single bar, repeated. Just for fun, there's a little bit of MIDI velocity variation, but that's something I do automatically without thinking, and once I'd done the clicking and dragging, I left it in place.

The bass is just a modified factory preset for Ableton's 'Analog' VA 'Virtual Analogue' synth from AAS (Applied Acoustics Systems), followed by a little bit of factory reverb. I know that there's a specific factory 'Bass' synth plug-in, but I just like Analog... In front of the synth, there's a factory Velocity MIDI plug-in the is turned off, but it is there so I can rapidly give a bit of extra velocity variation if I feel that it is needed. Again, this is just an insurance policy against boredom setting in. Confidence in live performance is all about knowing that you have done the preparation, and you are ready for any eventuality. Foreseen difficulties mean that you can have pre-prepared mitigations waiting to be activated, and everything can procede calmly and smoothly.

The bass line isn't going to win any prizes, but it is just background supporting material, and so the more it lurks in the background, the better.

The final part of the backing tracks is a couple of chords, so that there's more character to the background than just drums and bass. I used a factory preset for the AAS Collision physical modelling synth that you get in Ableton Live 10 Suite - because I love marimbas and their ilk. (Let me know when you get sick and tired of me putting 'factory' in front of everything!)

There's a MIDI 'Random' plug-in in front of the Collision PM synth, set up so that I can add random octave transpositions if I think that the chords are too boring.

After the Collision PM synth, there are three effects, a delay to give the chords a bit of rhythmic interest, then a factory chorus to round the marimba sound out a bit, and finally a factory reverb to put the chords back in the mix.

I so wanted to use my Max For Live chord utility here! But that would have been total overkill for two simple chords. Once again, there's nothing complex or clever here, just plain C major and an inverted C sus 4 (I've always had a weak spot for suspended chords!). That completes the backing tracks.

Syncopation

Which brings us to the start of what I hope is going to be the interesting bit, where I try to get the same sort of syncopated notes and rhythmic timbre variations as Ricky got using his modular synth. My starting point is a factory AAS Analog VA synth again, using a factory preset, and preceded by 'if I need it later' factory Random for octave variation, 'if I need it later' factory Velocity for MIDI velocity variations, and another factory Velocity plug-in for doing the gating for the syncopation:

After the synth plug-in, then since I'm going to only be using monophonic sounds, we can go West-Coast and have a factory Saturator plug-in to do 'wave-shaping' timbral changes, then a limiter to keep volume under control, followed by a factory Ping-Pong Delay and a factory Reverb. Once again, just in case, there's an LFO in there, but I'm not going to use it now since that would break the 'No Max For Live' limitation.

The 'Melody' line, and I hesitate to promote it to such dizzy heights, is more of the 'straight-forward' mind-set - just eight notes with an interval of an octave:

For the syncopation function, we need to be able to turn these notes on and off easily, using a simple control mechanism. For this, one easy approach is to use the factory MIDI Velocity plug-in, and to control the 'Out Hi' parameter. The 'Out Hi' rotary control sets the maximum MIDI velocity for a not that passes through the Velocity plug-in - but it you set it lower, then the maximum velocity goes lower, and if you se it to zero, then no notes pass thru - because a MIDI velocity of zero is the equivalent of a Note Off message. So if the 'Out Hi' parameter is set to 127, then all notes will pass through unchanged, whereas if it is set to zero, then no notes pass through.

The clip envelope is one of the newest features of Ableton Live, and is the key to doing the syncopation. All you do is create an up and down rectangular set of steps, gong between zero and 127, and set this to control the 'Out Hi' parameter in the Velocity plug-in:

The diagram shows the clip envelope that is controlling the 'Out Hi' parameter in the 'Velocity plug-in, and just jumps up and down between zero and 127. The Velocity plug-in then processes the MIDI notes going to the Analog synth. If I annotate the clip envelope with ticks for when the value is 127, and with crosses for when the value is zero, then we get a clearer picture of what the clip envelope is doing:

So the clip envelope drives the Velocity plug-in, which 'gates' the notes, and in the example shown, the fourth and eighth notes in the melody never get to the synth. So the clip envelope shape is 'gating' the notes before they are received by the synth. If the clip envelope shape changes, then the gating will change - and editing clip envelopes is easy!

One really easy way to change a clip envelope is to 'Unlink' it and then change the length:

In the screenshot above, the clip envelope is set to a length of slightly less than a bar: 3 beats and 3 'ticks'. So each time the bar repeats, the clip envelope will be a tick early. After four bars, the clip envelope will be a beat early, and after 16 bars, the clip envelope will be back in sync. As the clip envelope moves around in the bar, the notes that are allowed through the 'gating' function will change, so there will be 16 patterns of notes gated from the melody: one per bar.

If we set the clip envelope length to 3 beats, then there will be four patterns of notes gated from the melody, and so on. Just setting the clip envelope length, or moving one or two of those '127' high values, will change the notes that will be produced by the 'Melody' synth. And if you hover the mouse just underneath the top of one of those high clip envelope values, it will change colour (to blue) and you can then move it vertically as if it was a slider, so moving it between zero and 127 is easy. You can hear this note gating happening live in the video, as various lengths of clip envelope give changing patterns of notes played from the melody.

Timbral changes

For timbral variation, then a second clip envelope can be signed to the 'Drive' parameter in the factory Saturator plug-in audio effect. This time, the clip envelope looks much more conventional - just a sloping line or two:

Note tha this clip envelope is also unlinked, and it is set to 1 bar and 1 tick, so it is going to be later by one tick for each repeat of the bar, which gives 16 different times during the bar when that 'rise and dip' is gong to happen. Once again, changing the length of the clip envelope is going to give different timings for when the Saturator Drive hits the maximum value from the clip envelope.

The screenshot above shows a clip envelope with a length of one tick less than a bar, so this time the peak is going to happen earlier and earlier in the bar. The two clip envelopes (gating and saturator) are separate, so you can set them to different lengths and they will just repeat away, giving complex rhythmic changes in timbres and syncopated melody notes gated from the melody.

Controlling these variations is easy: change the length of one of the clip envelopes, or edit the clip envelope. All of this can be done, glitch-free (unless you over-drive the Saturator!), live during performance - which can be seen and heard in the video.

Marimba delay...

The Marimba chords have a little 'busy' or 'pickup' motif added by using a clip envelope to control the Wet/Dry mix of the Delay plug-in:

The blue highlighted section can be moved up and down as if it was a 'slider'-type control:

So turning it on an off is easy! But what is it doing?

 The clip envelope is controlling the Wet/Dry mix of the factory Ping-Pong Delay, and is the first time that a clip envelope has been 'linked' so that it runs at the same rate as the main bar timing! So for most of the bar, the wet/dry mix is set low, and so you only get faint ping-pong echoes, but for the last beat, the wet/dry mix goes very high and there are lots of echoes, and then at the end of the bar they all go away again. It adds an interesting variation to the playing of the chords. Can you figure out what would happen if this clip envelope was unlinked?

(In the .als file, there's a double 'pickup' example!)

Getting the YouTube video and the Ableton Live .als file

You can see the video here.

You can download the .als file here.

Modular Equivalents

Ricky's video is a good source for seeing one way to do similar transformations using a modular synthesiser, but there are many ways to achieve similar results in a modular or a DAW, and so assigning ME values is not a good indicator in this case.

Links in this blog post

1010 Music Blackbox

AAS (Applied Acoustics Systems)

My YouTube video

Ricky's video

Thanks

I must thank Enrique Martinez for his help in making the video and this blog post possible. His reply to my initial email happened amazingly quickly!


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