How to make Brian Eno style Generative Music // 20 ideas & tools // Ableton, Eurorack, Modular, VCV

hi this mess of cables is playing generative music term coined by Brian Eno to describe music that is always different and changing generated by a system but led by creative guidelines rather than typical music which follows a set of predetermined notes in this video we'll look at a few generative tools and techniques both in modular but also for Ableton Live standalone hardware in vcv rack and even an iPad app or two the idea isn't for computers to generate music on their own so don't worry AI isn't taking over yet but rather to take ideas you set and help you expand on existing melodies harmonies timbers and rhythms as well as inspire you to come up with new ones let's get started I'll start with the desktop and the first technique I'll look at is simple randomization which isn't the only generative technique but is certainly very useful one of the easiest way to liven up a sound or a beat is to apply randomization to one of its parameters let's take for example this simple loop it's quite boring and monotonous rather quickly but if I go ahead and apply a random LFO to it let's say I'll choose random and then apply that to velocity or to sustain in this case let's see what happens now with these parameters we can get a much more interesting groove at a rather simple pattern so I think you get the idea we didn't set the levels for the high hats in this loop but we set random boundaries within our creative control that make it a lot more interesting let's take a look at another example this time applying randomness to pitch what I have here is a simple one note but I have a few MIDI effects but I can apply to it the first is randomness this is kind of like sample and all going to pitch and unless you speak droid these are not the notes you're looking for however if I try and force these random notes into a scale it could sound a lot more musical and compelling and as I change that over time we can start to make up melodies maybe decreased chance a little bit and gain melodic ideas from randomness forced into a scale quantizers do the same thing on the Euro oxide now Harmon egg here from in stro is a really interesting quantizer because it can also create for note chords out of one voltage input you can either connect these four notes to four oscillators to create chords or like I'm doing here arpeggiate the four notes with a switch like boss bowtie so let's get this going I'll take the pitch output from boss bowtie plug it into rings and get clock lane now we're doing here's our edge waiting through these four notes and playing a chord with the root at F in this case I could change it this module also lets you play around with different inversions and different voicings if you can imagine modulating all these it also lets you determine the chord type so this is a major seventh but I can also go for say minor seventh you can imagine modulating or sequencing all these over time you can create really nice generative sequence just by setting a root node and then messing around with these modulations let's move on to another idea it could be actually quite liberating to play keyboard expressively and emotionally without worrying about whether the next note you play will be in scale or not so for example I've got the key step here set to arpeggiate and if I just smash a random group of notes doesn't sound so great right but if I go ahead and force those notes into a scale and it becomes more interesting because it takes these notes I'm smashing and makes them play something in the scale they chose and if I choose a different one let's say you clear falker scale which means when I go ahead and smash notes now could sound a lot more interesting and it sort of lets you approach a keyboard or a sequencer with more the feeling of what you want to play rather than the actual notes that you play so I can just blindly hit notes and maybe something nice will come out another potentially interesting way to create melodies using a scaler or a quantizer is to take a modulating waveform whether it's a simple LFO or a complex waveform and sample that sample and hold bits of that and play those bits through a quantizer so for example I'll take a stochastic or random envelope generated by the 5:06 here plug that in to install right and now we have an envelope where the attack and the decay or the rise and fall are generated randomly every loop and every time that attack decay envelope hits another note in the quantizer rings will play that note and I have an arpeggiated pattern quantized simply by feeding an envelope into a quantizer now I could change say the amplitude of that envelope or the offset to play different notes or move it at different rates maybe go faster or slower I could pass this waveform through a triggered sample and hold module to sample specific notes at specific times but I think you get the idea how even a simple attack decay envelope can be a source of melody now applying an envelope to a scaler or even sending random notes to be quantized can get a little bit repetitive even though it's random as odd as that might sound an interesting way of controlling chaos is the Turing machine a concept invented by Tom Whitwell and inspired by the work of Alan Turing implemented in a broad range of software and hardware instruments there's a Turing machine max for live script sold by a company called encoder audio and there's a reactor module as well a link to those below and aside from the actual turning machine module the algorithm is embedded in other modules such as marbles and ornament and crime a cool way to show you visually how a Turing machine works is in pigments by Arturia they recently implemented a little Turing machine as a modulation source in their software so the basic sound that I'm going to use is this patch right I'll play a note in and get that pitch back now I can take this cheering machine as a modulation source and apply it to any destination that I want let's choose for example the coarse pitch parameter you know set it to go say all the way up here and now if I hit this note I'll get random pitches that doesn't sound too great so let me quantize it right now the way a touring machine works is this there's a pattern that has a certain length and you can determine that in the Turing machine let's take a short length just for demonstration purposes and at its core you can just play a fixed pattern based on random samples that went into it before but as I turn this flip knob clockwise it'll start introducing new notes every now and then to the pattern and if I turn the flip knob to 50% it'll just introduce random notes every time so the idea is to sort of wait for or be lucky and get a pattern that you like and then either lock it and if I don't like it I'm bringing up some other notes okay this is cool so now I got a Turing machine to inspire a new melody based on a quantization that I said and I can just stick with that and go with it or if I don't like it change it a bit every now and then okay and another option is as I turn this flip knob clockwise then the loop post will start looping onto itself but inverting every time sort of like a Mobius loop and this is a four note loop which is eight notes long once flipped they can change its length obviously introduce randomness back again maybe reduce the modulation depth of it that's going too high [Music] okay so just to summarize there are two core parameters to Turing machines the length of the loop and the probability that it will change in the next step Turing machines don't have to be applied just to notes they can be applied to any parameter to generate rhythmic effects so for example this is my core note I can say apply a Turing machine to the filter cutoff and same as before I can choose to lock in a pattern if I like it and get a certain rhythmic result change the length if I want and I modulate but just change the length I like this pattern I'm good to go and if not start changing it either gradually or all the time and of course flip works here as well I'll show you how the Turing machine in ornament and crime works a little bit later as I walk you through the intro patch to this video ok so Turing machines are really nice generative modulation sources but certainly not the only ones you can create your own generative mods or TSA's by combining several modulators together using a simple DC coupled mixer and then introducing random parameters to those modulators let me explain so i've got a simple sine wave or the pho coming out of her mode here and i'll put it on the scope and I've got envelopes coming out of the 506 here to take a look at those I didn't they've got their relative speeds I could change that I can change the shape if I want and maybe make it even faster alright now you'll notice that the attack and decay parameters of this envelope are changing and the way that the 5:06 works is that it has minimum and maximum values for the rise and for the fall and as I play around with those the attack and decay or the rise in the fall of the envelopes it's generating will change ever recycle now if I take these two and feed them into the mixer so one another fill out say into input number one and then second envelope out into input number two I now have a randomized attack decay envelope riding a sine wave now what that sounds like through a quantizer is anyone's guess but it's something and it's something you might want to play with and change its rate or if you wanted a more steady beat you could apply a sample and hold to this newly created waveform and reduce chaos a bit now I actually used this idea in a slightly Sanger way to shift the arpeggiating pattern in the patch at the beginning of this video more on that in the patch walkthrough later now in that patch I use another useful generative tool which is the sequential switch or a CV switch like the boss bowtie here the idea is quite simple you feed in multiple inputs and only one can come out depending on voltage levels determined here or you have one source distributed to four separate places wherever you want again based on voltage levels going in I want to just take a minute to talk about musical modes in generative music if you've set your pattern in motion and you're happy with it then great but what you might find is that even though you selected a scale or a mode feeding a Turing machine or a complex LFO into it doesn't quite do the job of making you feel like you're in the mode you're looking for let me explain as you may know musical modes are often associated with different feelings for example major is considered happy minor little bit sad and say Phrygian sounds oriental now what you may have noticed is as I played these modes in their degree relative to see I only used the white keys which means that if you're just sending random sample and hold values to white keys you're not gonna get a particular scale you're not gonna get the feeling you want so far be it for me to tell you how to create your music but if you want to get the feeling of these modes you'll need to either anchor your melody or select fewer notes or create a bass line with a root note of the mode or limit your notes to play chords of selected modes and then move through those chords rather than just randomly playing all the notes in a particular mode I refer again back to the patch I played in the beginning of this video I stuck to a few base notes and played quarter pedos which gave it that certain feeling of a particular mode now obviously I had harmony to help me with selecting the specific notes that I wanted and creating chords out of them in the scale that I selected there are other eurorack modules that will also let you limit your note choices and not just play semitones or even not display all the notes of a scale other non you options to enforce modes on sequences or random notes are noodler from conductive labs which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago and there's also an app called polyphase for the iPad which lets you create four lanes a friend about generators but then block them in two modes or chords that you like a link to those below and if you know of any other or wonder I commend other options please leave a comment below now once you've settled on the way you want to generate notes another way to introduce variety into your music or to expand on an idea is to keep the melody intact but vary the rhythm now this can be anything from simply adding rests and ties to your note triggers so that they don't play in a single bore note per beat rhythm all the way to introducing various degrees of randomness to when notes or beats in a sequence are triggered okay let's move on a problem you may find with randomly generated notes or rhythms is that depending on your taste they might sound too chaotic if that's the case consider introducing deliberate planned or predictable elements alongside the random ones let's take a look at an example what I have here is a snare and a hi-hat alternately randomly playing which doesn't sound like much of anything but if I introduce a constant element we might have something see what I mean marbles by the way also has a dedicated AI drum mode as well as a whole right side which works like a souped-up Turing machine it's free on VC V rack and certainly worth a look if you want this kind of madness in non modular form check out step divider in Ableton's probability pack and yeah you can set your own rates per lanes and divisions you can randomize everything and it's up to you to make order out of this chaos but I think you get the idea now let's get back to the marbles patch there are two more cool generative ideas hiding here aside from aligning predictability alongside randomness the first is a simple clock divider so what I did in this patch is just divide the trigger by four to get this kick but any other division like by three or fine or anything else might sound interesting as well now not all generative setups have or need a fixed tempo but if you have one then tempo synched lfos by modules like her mode or simple clock dividers can add really interesting variation to your to your patch but at different rates and different intervals that are aligned and in sync with whatever's going on the second useful generative idea in this patch is the probability gate in outputs t1 and t3 the idea is that based on a certain algorithm either t1 or t3 is triggered so let's hear what this sounds like notice that as I turn this bias knob if I turn it all the way clockwise you'll only hear hi hats and then as I turn it counterclockwise the probability that you'll hear a snare increases all the way to just hearing snares but in the ideas that you can play this probability just like an instrument maybe make fills or use some sort of external modulator to move the bias knob for you now this probability decision can lead to a simple outcome as it is here either a hi-hat or snare being played or to any other short or long subsequent chain of events that will follow either side of the coin toss say for example you can go on to play pattern a versus pattern B on the da side at least in Ableton you can get similar results using follow actions so the idea here is that you set the probability and then choose what happens when that probability occurs and you can easily switch to you know the next pattern first pattern or any pattern or any other pattern based on whether that probability occurs or not let's move on another interesting way to create evolving and interesting sequences from a few basic ingredients is to route several simple different length sequences into one on the da side this can be accomplished by routing two or more simple MIDI sequences to one instrument track so let's take a look at this for example I've got a simple pattern here it's four beats long one node repeating itself and if I take this pattern which is a different note repeating itself after 13 steps rather than four something begins to happen and then let's add another one this time ever you 14 steps and this is a great example of how polyrhythmic or Poli metric patterns can create evolving music even if they have just one note in them now the reason this works is because all these three tracks are routed to track four which in this case is my piano if you want to implement this concept in a dulles environment you may be able to take multiple MIDI tracks in your sequencer and send them to one MIDI channel destination or use an external MIDI merge box on the urx side I can use our good old friend the mixer here to achieve the same result so for example I could create a sequence here on Renee which would be let's say seven notes long you determine that with the XS parameter on the X channel and then maybe 11 notes long on the y channel and then merge those outgoing Kate events through a simple mixer and this is a nice segue into another interesting generative tool which is binary logic modules binary as you may know is simply zeros and ones and the idea behind a binary logic module is that you feed it at least two sets of zeros and ones and it will make a decision based on whether they're 0 or 1 or whether it's a high gate or low gate and output either 0 or 1 which is the result of that decision a mixer is really an example of a simple or logic binary module or means that it will send out a high gate weather channel Y sends out high gate channel X sends out a high gate or both that's the meaning of the logic or function now there are modules like dis ting or dedicated logic modules which have different algorithms that choose whether a gate is produced or not for example an end logic gate will only produce a trigger if both x and y have a high gate signal an xor logic gate will produce a trigger only if one but not both x and y are high this thing has even more logic options like NAND nor and snorer which become increasingly confusing but I think the bottom line isn't the specific logic operation but rather that these are interesting ways of combining two gates that will produce different results every time based on the logic used another generative idea wanted to offer to you is to make safe bets and I'll demonstrate this with Ableton's melodic probability module in its probability pack so let's take this simple melody for example nice but can get prepared it after a while now I can shift its octaves for example but a safe bet would be maybe to shift an octave every now and then so simple pattern can get a lot more interesting if we make a few safe bets here and there we want to take more risks let's mess around with random velocity every now and then [Music] right so it's the same notes but we have a little bit more going on with relatively few risks another safe bet is to just randomly not play notes in your sequence the chance parameter in electrons model samples works this way as do trig conditions and sequencers like those found in other electron instruments or the deluge for example where you can change the probability of a specific step or all the steps in a sequence of occurring [Music] another nice example of safe bets in a dulles environment the spice parameter in micro freak will mess with gates triggers and eventually pitch when you add some dice but in a safe way transposing octaves and if temper changes across octaves a nice side effect is temper and opposition and if we weren't really bound the madness you can see where we started okay now this video is getting way too long as it is and I only covered about half the ideas I wanted to I'll show you a couple more things and then put the rest in my book of electronic music ideas tips and tricks available to people who support this channel on patreon I didn't want to get too carried away in this video if there is an interest but if there is let me know in the comment section and I'll make a follow-up part two to this video so before we go I wanted to talk about a few cool vcv rack modules and then at the end I'll walk you through the patch that I played in the intro to this video so I reached out to my vcv ragu on Ricoh head and asked him what his top generative VCV modules are and he not only told me what they were but also created three lovely patches around them here they are notes sec from JW modules is a polyphonic grid based sequencer with interesting randomization and grid manipulation functions including a built-in game of life and it's particularly useful for polyphonic generative patterns gray code from Squinkie labs is an alternate take at the Turing machine concept rather than shifting all the bits sideways when introducing a new random it will randomize a different bid every time the end result sounds different musically and it also gives you access to each of the individual bits as an on/off gate so you can sort of look at it as a random clock divider as well finally there's a module called generative from amalgamated harmonics and it is as its name implies an interesting module for generative exploration rather than taking completely random numbers as an input it lets you build your own complex waveform using a combination of an LFO noise FM and AM and then apply sampling probability to that as a source [Music] and I won't dig further into these patches here but they'll be available on my patreon for you to download if you like and check out o Murray's Channel it's an amazing resource for vcv RAC and patching ideas in general okay now let's take a look at how a lot of the ideas in this video work in this patch for that let's lower the level of all the five channels I use so that we can look at them one by one let's start simple everything is going into this stereo mixer by pan mix we've got the two stereo arpeggio lines going into the left and right side out of rings one panned hard left one panned hard right this is the baseline here then we've got these two I guess we can call them evolving drones one pen left one pen right so those are the five or four elements in this patch depending on how you want to look at it the base pattern is coming out of Sto then going into the VCA then through lead Grover for distortion which I can control through here and then just smack in the middle not panned left all right the actual baseline is the root note of the chord coming out of harmony by instrument so we've got this cable here split out going into sto which determines the bass so you can follow along the base here and the notes that it's receiving are random notes coming in through here over the first channel in ornament and crime now this first of three channels in ornament in crime you can select the channels using this little knob here is just playing random semitones it doesn't really matter because we're quantizing this anyway through in straw and if we scroll down you can see that this is a Turing machine and these are the limits up and down and it's set to go completely random smack in the middle at 50% 128 is 50% if I want it to be a static melody I'd lock it in going to 0 and if I wanted to flip I'd go all the way to 256 so that is the baseline again played by the root note coming out of harmony and then harmony is taking this root note and generating a chord out of it and in this case I'm not playing it polyphonically as a chord but rather I'm using the BAS bow tie to arpeggiate the chord coming through rings now boss bow tie is a kind of special module it's sort of like a sequential switch but the steps are voltage controlled and as you can see it's sort of cycling through different groups or different subsets of steps as time goes by so the four core notes of the chord are in these four steps of bass bow tie but it's not always playing them sometimes it's playing only one or two notes of the arpeggio to the chord and the rest it's not doing anything what determines this pattern the cycling pattern through the various inputs of bas bow tie is this cable coming out of distinct which is the sum of two things the first thing that dis ting is mixing here is the voltage levels coming out of quite mega slope right and right now it's set to a very simple four-step sequence but I could easily change the amount of steps to five or three or two or whatever I wanted I'll stick to four in this patch and then the second thing that is summing is a random envelope coming out of the ADAC 506 so at the end of the day the arpeggiated pattern is a combination of this envelope and then these voltages writing on top now sometimes you won't hear anything because the voltage is spending most of its time in this part of bas bowtie and these the speed of the envelope changes every cycle randomly based on the stochastic random levels determined between these two mini and maximum levels here and the end result is this sometimes of our pretty little arpeggiate all four notes sometimes one or two sometimes none now the speed at which it goes down through here and the speed that it which it goes back up is completely random every cycle based on the stochastic number is generated here so that's the baseline played the rest do and the arpeggiator pattern played through wordings I also have an LFO coming into the brightness parameter coming all the way from her mode over here this is a simple slow sine LFO now the timing relationship between these two is determined by a simple clock coming out of her mode so if I stop it you'll notice this stops and also these notes the the basic core base notes stop changing as well so what's going on in Quade the mega slope is that as I run the pattern right now I've got it set to a four step pattern every time this pattern completes there is an end of cycle trigger that goes and generates another random note and shifts the entire chord and baseline in harmonic so this is what it sounds like when there is a potential random shift every four steps on the arpeggio and you're not hearing it but you will soon as the cycle goes down here but if I was to change this say to a three step sequence [Music] alright then we'd get a shift in the base note every 3 notes here that sounds very different from 4 obviously I could move it obviously to five and change the order here anyway that I wanted rings will play a different note every time there's a voltage change the last element in this patch are these two notes and these are actually quite simple sequences generated here in channel B and C this one's transposed two octaves up you can see the various ranges and probabilities here doesn't really matter you adjust this to taste and they're playing pentatonic miners on both right so this the a channel is just semitones I just need random numbers for the baseline thank you I'm keeping it simple in both channels two pentatonic minor now both these channels are controlled by stochastic envelopes so this movement up and down is the timing of this movement is completely random for every cycle based on these two channels of the 5:06 and in terms of level they're going into the VCAs over here and I'm taking the end of fall trigger when over a cycle ends to not only obviously reset the randomness of the envelope but also to potentially change a note using one of these two channels in ornament and crime [Music] so that's basically the patch we've got a filter being modulated here as well for both of these coupons stereo filter for make noise the cutoff modulation is a simple sine wave LFO out of her mode so these two drone nodes don't need a clock they'll just repeat every time they finish a cycle if I turn on the clock in her mode the baseline and the arpeggio will gradually come in and start moving the patch will feel a little bit different because we're playing a five note arpeggio this time around and yeah that's pretty much it like I said there are quite a few more ideas in my book available to people who support this channel on patreon if you have any other generative tips or tricks feel free to leave them in the comment section below if you want to see a part two to this video let me know as well there is a belt to click after you hit subscribe to increase your odds of seeing the next one hit like if this was useful thanks for watching [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: loopop

Views: 201,550

Rating: 4.9642501 out of 5

Keywords: brian eno generative, generative

Id: _FpnxbALbLE

Length: 36min 54sec (2214 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019