DaveyG wrote: ↑18 Jun 2023
I love players. For me they are absolutely the best thing about Reason but I'm really not getting on with the trial of this one. I think it's going to end up on the very short list of players that I don't buy along with two of the Panda's more complex players. The UI is very cluttered and I'm just not getting good results from it. Sorry TM!
Not buying the two Panda players because of their complexity is understandable. But this one isn't *that* complicated. It absolutely can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. I'm not sure how much of a try you have given this, but I would suggest giving it some more time and dig a bit deeper. It's worth it. It's a really useful player and it can help you come up with some very interesting rhythms other players just aren't capable of making.
Don't worry about all the knobs and all the features. It can be very useful with just the very basic stuff I'll talk about below.
-Brief overview-
The right side is for note settings.
It basically has two modes: sequencer (predefined) and arpeggiator (dynamic).
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Referencing the picture below... The circled parts are basically just the buttons to select between note, vel, length matrix views. Each of them have two modes: sync or async.
Sync will restart the note pattern in sync with the rhythm section (on the left). So each time the rhythm section completes it's revolution and returns to the top of the wheel, the notes on the right will restart playing from the beginning of the sequence (basically like a restart trigger).
Async will continue playing all the notes in the sequencer regardless of the rhythm wheel. So if you don't want the notes to restart after 3 steps, you could select "async" to the right of the note number "up/down" arrow buttons and in this example the sequencer would keep playing all 16 notes (empty or populated) and return to the beginning of the sequencer patter after the 16th note. This is a cool way to get different velocity or length values that aren't so much random, rather, they cycle through all the steps (depending on how many steps you have selected (left of the sync up/down button).
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The left side is for rhythm settings. This determines how often and at what speed the note sequencer (on the right side) moves. You can think of this as having Robotic Bean Sequences (in stepped mode) being driven by Robotic Bean Euclid (via CV in to Sequences Trigger in).
There are 4 different types (with two modes each). The two modes (CYCLE and STEP) are basically just locking the rhythm to fire at times determined by the length (setting to the right of the cycle/step button).
Pulses is the most simple of the 4 types, so let's look at that.
In the example below, it's set to STEP with 1/4 lengths. There are three steps. So the player will play the notes in the sequencer (right side) at a rate of 1 note per 1/4 beat (so basically quarter notes in 4/4 time signature). Since there are only 3 notes, it will just return to the first note and play it again. So notes C D E will play 1(C) & 2 (D) & 3 (E) & 4 (C) & 1 (D) & 2(E) & 3(C) & 4(D) and so on.
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If you switch to CYCLE it will play the number of notes (in the example below, I've got 3) in the amount of time selected to the right of the "cycle/step" button. In this example it will play 3 notes in one bar. So perfect triplets. You could increase it to 7 and it will play back septuplets. Go nuts! It's a polyrhythm monster!
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And if you still can't get anything going, don't forget to try out the presets in the menu button below the wheel (in the more complicated types Euclid Collision & Altered Euclid). Loads of great rhythms in there to try out and tweak.
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