Climbing the Squarp Pyramid!

cool all right everyone welcome to a new live stream today is sunday i got a new toy with me uh it is the squarep pyramid uh which is a hardware midi sequencer made by swarp instruments in france uh yeah so if you guys are familiar with the uh scorp hermod which is kind of the eurorack cousin of this um it's a bit different i think i think we're gonna we're gonna figure it out today but basically the plan i'm not changing my patch at all um so my patch uh is the exact same as it was from my previous stream uh the only difference is i'm swapping from using my data sequence to using the pyramid to sequence [Music] and we're going to give it a go i think there's some cool stuff that this can do it seems really powerful there's just a lot and i'm just going to kind of see how it compares to the the daw specifically if we can kind of get to a workflow i haven't i like basically unboxed this like literally a couple hours ago and was just messing around to see if i can get it connected um one of the things to talk about uh the pyramid is not eurorack specific it does have let me see if i can show this it does have cv outputs on it and inputs but just one so it has one envelope uh gate and uh pitch output cv wise uh which is useful but it's not you know that's not really what this is made to do um so we're going to be using it in combination with uh the uh expert sleepers fh2 which is going to be the midi midi to cv uh utility knife i guess is a good way to think about it our swiss army knife of midi to cv so like i said the patch is the same as it was on friday so no changes there um and we're just gonna mess with this and see how it goes and hopefully we can learn it i got the this is really nice i like this they ship it with this nice little overview a literal overview for lack of a better word uh to uh to tell you how to use the thing which is cool um it this theoretically do some cool stuff especially with midi cc messages so the way i have my fh2 set up is a lot of the channels have extra midi cc coming out of them so i want if i want to use the fh2 to modulate other parameters or other values within within this synth i can do that with the midi cc uh two voltage conversion done by the fh2 this uh gives you pretty fine grained access to all of the midi cc values and it has this cool i haven't enabled right now but there's underneath here there's this xy touchpad so you can actually use this to modify parameters and really like almost like draw them in if you will which is neat um so we'll be messing around with that hopefully uh i think the way this kind of like works is going to be pretty different um we'll see but yeah should be fun so let me just make sure i have everything set up here because i don't think i do cool all right so there's clock lock is working cool so my my settings are saved here so uh let's do this reset tracks info so this should be a new everything and i'm literally like just figuring out this out as i go so uh if i go to track so for the sake argument um [Music] okay i don't know what i'm doing that's fun all right let's just even get some sound out so if i go to track and i say midi channel and we're just going to say this is going to be usb channel 10. so uh the way i have my fh2 set up is i have one uh dedicated uh expander one of the gate expanders dedicated to drums and that is midi channel 10 for triggers uh so that way uh if we did this right and i changed my note and i changed the mode we're in [Music] like i said i don't know what i'm doing let's just go to stop sequence because this i know so i know that c2 is my kick there we go houston we have sound we uh get some compression on this awful there we go so this is uh let me show you what i'm looking at so this is one of the reasons that i was excited about this is the the euclidean sequencing so especially for drums we can do things like and we can rotate which is cool cool so get that track and now let's go to track 2 somehow not you old track press track too uh there we go okay and now i set midi just so you guys can see it same deal i want track 10 or channel 10. midi and this should be a different drum and mute a meter kick if i go back to step and say euclidean i'm going to change my note to [Music] [Music] same deal let's do track three midi step [Music] cool so i think that's working obviously which is neat ah shortcuts here good to know so this one let's do 16 fill eight hmm i'm looking the wrong one again [Music] okay [Music] [Music] [Music] cool [Music] hmm [Music] so okay let's figure out something a little more melodic just meet those for now all right i'm gonna say midi usb channel one i go to live [Music] [Music] so it's uh worth calling out that uh we do have the symphonian uh still quantizing things based on the previous patch so if it sounds a little weird that's why so even though the keyboard on this is uh not constraining us to a scale at all uh the symphonian is so that's why [Music] right these both sound the same even though uh they are different notes technically the symphony is actually confining us to something different uh so now we should be able to like play something in [Music] let's look okay so there's some nice shortcuts here in terms of just uh you know you know getting rid of stuff but see i like the step sequencers better personally just because it's easier to and that's way loud [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so we have uh let me use this track and i believe it's midi channel [Music] three so now if i unmute this that i go to the step sequencer [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so on this page [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] cool [Music] [Music] [Music] um so [Music] [Music] mm-hmm [Applause] [Music] do i need to like save it is that the um that doesn't seem right [Music] um [Applause] okay [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] why do you keep doing that i don't get it i want to read the manual because i'm lazy um yeah it is a it's a it's pretty great actually it's pretty useful uh i haven't opened the menu yet though i'm starting to get to the point where i'm getting uh stuck just based on what's here um but yes it is just like a nice little instructional overlay if i take it off you can see the nice gray finish on it which is cool [Music] see now how do i edit the sequence is the real question here [Music] hmm let's go look at the manual in track mode hold sequence [Music] why do you do that i don't get it that's not what i programmed it as do i have to no it shouldn't matter right [Music] [Music] [Applause] um [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] um let's continue reading because i don't get it mm-hmm oh boy man this thing is deep mm-hmm all right so that makes sense [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] all right this is where i'm getting lost so uh i don't understand why it's not saving the freaking state um this is frustrating why aren't you doing the thing is that the problem is that this needs to be on i think is that it oh my god okay thank you that does make sense but man that is uh okay [Music] okay that makes way more sense now okay so you actually have to record the mute state so this needs to be on in order for it to actually save the states otherwise so you can do like if i didn't do that i could do like live muting which is useful and then if i wanted to i can basically reinitialize everything but it's not it didn't save the mute states that way i can uh play the mutes on the fly which is really the concept of this um at the heart of it i think uh essentially [Music] you're muting and unmuting tracks that's kind of the way the sequencer works so like i can unmute the other two tracks we can even make like [Applause] maybe on this one i just want just the kick [Music] so okay this is starting to make a lot more sense now and i feel like um cool all right let's uh stop this let's figure out this whole pattern concept so if i go to track track one is our kick oops select track one [Music] um i don't know what that means at all let's find out pattern is a track variation each track you can create up to 32 patterns each pattern will have its own note cc automation fx automation and utility engine also length time run mode default pc bank message oh okay program change got it first you have to enable patterns on the select track wrestling to try and enable pattern okay so hold step okay [Music] interesting okay okay [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] ah okay okay that's cool [Music] so [Music] four go go go all right so let me just uh recap that so the idea is is that your tracks so like the the kind of simple form is you could have multiple tracks each track uh can be doing you could have multiple tracks on the same midi channel on the same device so like for example i have these first six tracks so track one two three four five six i have set up to be my drum tracks that are all going to the fh2 uh one two three four five six if i play essentially what is happening right is uh i can mute each one of these so right now it's just the kick i'll turn this off that's the kick right you get the idea i don't think there's anything on here right now no this is duplicated um so uh that's neat the other part is neat is that you can have so for example this is my kick which is just straight you know quarter notes um but on this pattern you can see it's different right i changed it i want to show that again so you can see it's a different pattern versus that well that's neat [Music] okay okay there's a lot here so i'm going to go to this track which should be my note track yep and i want to add some effects so this is cool so now if i hit play [Music] [Music] all right because this is not a pattern okay so let's do this [Music] track [Music] [Applause] p1 [Applause] [Music] i have a view 100. [Music] so now if i make a e2 and i hit fx on this okay i think i lost my notes there too so that's unfortunate uh can i copy patterns [Music] [Music] can i copy patterns ah there we go so now i should be able to do a second but i don't want to go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] maybe i'm missing something uh um oh man there's a lot here all right i think i might call it for now uh i do want to play with this more i think um i'm probably just going to play with that a bit on my own time uh it feels like something that once you get it it can be really fast but there's just a lot in uh like once you get the kind of nuances i think it'll go quick but uh it's a little bit obtuse right now i think which is unfortunate but i think there's there's just so much depth i mean like this thing does so freaking much i haven't even gotten to like the midi cc stuff uh but yeah i think it's just there's a lot here fun cool all right

Channel: Build.

Views: 1,335

Rating: 4.478261 out of 5

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Id: HwJGd7BSjRE

Length: 72min 35sec (4355 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020