Pattern Mutator => tweaks => Pattern Mutator

[integerpoet]

I am way behind the curve and have just started playing with Pattern Mutator.

Pretty quickly, I have found mutants which sound almost good — or at least inspiring — and I want to tweak them.

So, yes, I could send them to the main sequencer and edit them there. But then I'd need a way to get them back into Pattern Mutator to subject them to further evolution.

I found a way to do that by — laugh with me — sending them out to a virtual MIDI device outside Reason and then back into Reason and the Pattern Mutator. But that's crazy. There must be a better way,

One idea I came up with was to put a rack extension sequencer "after" Pattern Mutator in the player stack and play the pattern into the sequencer and edit the pattern in that sequencer.

Then, I was thinking, I could move the sequencer "before" Pattern Mutator and play the sequencer into Pattern Mutator and BANG — there's a workflow I could live with.

But quickly I discovered that 32 steps is the maximum any of the player sequencers I have on hand can handle. And of course Pattern Mutator can manage patterns with many more steps than 32.

Is there a player sequencer which can handle at least 64 steps? Preferably 128 (!) to match Pattern Mutator.

Alternatively, can anybody think of a nice workflow that would accomplish the same thing another way?

Maybe I am just insufficiently fluent in MIDI routing within Reason?

[PhillipOrdonez]

Send to track, edit, enable player again and record into it and mutate?

[Carly(Poohbear)]

Why don't you just record into the main sequencer and then you can make your changes and record that back to pattern sequencer?

[PhillipOrdonez]

I thought Carly was going to come up with some advanced method I couldn't even begin to imagine how to achieve, but instead his advice was the exact same thing I said.

[integerpoet]

This is something like what I was thinking it should be possible to do.

But then I couldn't figure out how to send the main sequencer back into Pattern Mutator.

This is what I meant by "Maybe I am just insufficiently fluent in MIDI routing within Reason?"

I was right! The real problem is lack of clue on my part! And remains so!

[integerpoet]

OK, from the Department of Brains Are Weird…

The problem was that I had talked myself out of trying this.

I intuited that I would have to explicitly route the relevant note lane in the main sequencer to the Pattern Mutator.

Nope.

But I looked for a way to do that anyway, and, finding none, I resorted to the silly work-around mentioned above.

Turns out…

When you engage the REC button on the Pattern Mutator, it apparently starts listening to all MIDI, no matter where it comes from.

So if you then play back what's in the main sequencer, the Pattern Mutator will pick it up as if you were playing it "live" on a controller.

TIL! Thanks for prodding me to experiment.

[integerpoet]

And this took me a while to figure out:

"Recording" back into Pattern Mutator is additive, which means:

Unless your loop in the main sequencer has the exact same notes every time through, you're overdubbing.

So you usually (but probably not always) want to press the CLEAR PATTERN button before the REC button.

[Carly(Poohbear)]

I thought Carly was going to come up with some advanced method I couldn't even begin to imagine how to achieve, but instead his advice was the exact same thing I said.

No one had replied, I wrote my comment and then got distracted then came back and posted it, it did say something about some else had posted, did not realise that it was the same thing so just to advance it up.....

I wrote a Step Seq in Voltage Modular which is 999 steps (called Store and Forward, https://store.cherryaudio.com/modules/p ... nd-forward ) , you could record into that, if it's monophonic data we can get it back into Reason via Audio and the convert the CV to audio (e.g Thor will do), then using either a combinator or CV tap you could then record back into the pattern mutator, if poly then go via a loopback straight the instrument which of course means it will go via the pattern mutator for recording the poly stuff... Will that do

[integerpoet]

I wrote a Step Seq in Voltage Modular which is 999 steps (called Store and Forward, https://store.cherryaudio.com/modules/p ... nd-forward ) , you could record into that, if it's monophonic data we can get it back into Reason via Audio and the convert the CV to audio (e.g Thor will do), then using either a combinator or CV tap you could then record back into the pattern mutator, if poly then go via a loopback straight the instrument which of course means it will go via the pattern mutator for recording the poly stuff... Will that do

Clearly simpler than the flow I have going now.

[integerpoet]

I wrote a Step Seq in Voltage Modular which is 999 steps (called Store and Forward, https://store.cherryaudio.com/modules/p ... nd-forward ) , you could record into that, if it's monophonic data we can get it back into Reason via Audio and the convert the CV to audio (e.g Thor will do), then using either a combinator or CV tap you could then record back into the pattern mutator, if poly then go via a loopback straight the instrument which of course means it will go via the pattern mutator for recording the poly stuff... Will that do

Clearly simpler than the flow I have going now.

But seriously: Why isn't there a player sequencer which...

• allows up to 128 steps to parallel Pattern Mutator
• has a manual editing interface no less rich than that of the main sequencer
• supports the same copy/paste patch format as Pattern Mutator
• anything else would be gravy

I mean, I know the answer: Because these are features of a hypothetical Pattern Mutator 2.0.

But also: If you're hoping to sell an RE or three to people who use RRP in a DAW which makes this kind of tweaking flow more difficult, this might not be a terrible idea. Especially if you already have a sequencer player RE lying around in your product lineup.

And also: I have long wondered why sequencers generally don't allow more than 16 or 32 steps. I know they sometimes offer ways to kinda-sorta overcome that, but they're awkward.

[challism]

I have often wished there were a way to tweak the results of the mutator (shall I call it the mutation?) within the player. The only control we have his to spin the wheel and change the linear timing of the loop. Other than that, the only option you have is to record/bounce/send to track.

[rgdaniel]

Why not just use the "copy mutation to pattern" dropdown (lower right) to copy mutation 1 to pattern 2, for example, then tweak it, then copy mutation 2 to pattern 3, repeat up to 8 times. Feel like I'm missing something... (known to happen)

[PhillipOrdonez]

I thought Carly was going to come up with some advanced method I couldn't even begin to imagine how to achieve, but instead his advice was the exact same thing I said.

No one had replied, I wrote my comment and then got distracted then came back and posted it, it did say something about some else had posted, did not realise that it was the same thing so just to advance it up.....

I wrote a Step Seq in Voltage Modular which is 999 steps (called Store and Forward, https://store.cherryaudio.com/modules/p ... nd-forward ) , you could record into that, if it's monophonic data we can get it back into Reason via Audio and the convert the CV to audio (e.g Thor will do), then using either a combinator or CV tap you could then record back into the pattern mutator, if poly then go via a loopback straight the instrument which of course means it will go via the pattern mutator for recording the poly stuff... Will that do

Whoomp! There it is

[Carly(Poohbear)]

Clearly simpler than the flow I have going now.

But seriously: Why isn't there a player sequencer which...

• allows up to 128 steps to parallel Pattern Mutator
• has a manual editing interface no less rich than that of the main sequencer
• supports the same copy/paste patch format as Pattern Mutator
• anything else would be gravy

I mean, I know the answer: Because these are features of a hypothetical Pattern Mutator 2.0.

But also: If you're hoping to sell an RE or three to people who use RRP in a DAW which makes this kind of tweaking flow more difficult, this might not be a terrible idea. Especially if you already have a sequencer player RE lying around in your product lineup.

And also: I have long wondered why sequencers generally don't allow more than 16 or 32 steps. I know they sometimes offer ways to kinda-sorta overcome that, but they're awkward.

I agree and personally it's annoying that we are really there with devices that have patterns, if only a simple pointer was added e.g. what pattern do I play next.
Now I do have a combinator that does auto move to the next pattern, great for playback not for recording as each one has to be recorded separately..

So the best workflow is to make your changes the main Seq. and record back to PM.

[integerpoet]

By the way, here's my first Pattern Mutator victory:



And yes there's lots of by-hand groove tweaking in there, but PM got me to the point where I felt like doing that would be worth the effort.

I think this may have started in Bassline Generator months ago, but if so I had "printed" to the main sequencer and deleted the BG device from the rack, so we'll never know.

[integerpoet]

By the way, here's my first Pattern Mutator victory…

First-and-a-half victory?



It needs some velocity tweaking, but that's not PM's fault.

[integerpoet]

(I deleted the audio clip from the prior post because I forgot my rule: never post anything until the next day. )