Reason Livestream – Bassline Generator with Mattias and Ludvig

[Music] okay [Music] guys it is stream o'clock chris hello from new zealand hello how you guys doing down there i don't i think it's my maybe if it's tomorrow is it wednesday in new zealand i think it is guys let's do this let's go live simon let the fun begin on your q simon i'm letting the fun begin hey what's up guys how's everyone doing let's turn the music down a little bit dug that down this is the snooge how's everyone doing welcome to another reason live stream these are becoming something of a tradition when we drop a new feature a new product a new an upgrade a new device all those sort of things it's almost become sort of expected in fact when we released baseline generator but before we had announced this live stream people were commenting on youtube and saying can't wait for the can't wait for the live stream and so they're just now it's it's expected and for good reason because they're super fun they're fun for us to do and hopefully they're fun for you guys to watch um alexander sup from the bay area oh hi neighbor i'm bay area as well um i'm one of the i'm i'm the i'm on the outside lands if i can use a bay area reference i'm on the outside lands of the reason studios world everybody else for the most part is over in stockholm we got a couple other people australia los angeles but um anyway well it looks like everything's working i'm keeping an eye on the comments here just to make sure as we kind of get going here that people are hearing things they're seeing things and i'm seeing a lot of hellos hello from massachusetts um and uh we got some people asking how am i i'm quite good thank you very much um you know pop that one up there you go like hello ryan deep trance hey how's it going um greetings from ireland there we go okay so everybody is making their way i'm glad you know we it's always such a moving target to try and find the right time of day to do these and we've sort of hit upon this time and i'm sure some of you watching are going like the right time of day it's four in the morning in insert country here but um you know for the most part this seems to kind of hit the right targets you know maybe you're having dinner and watching this over in europe maybe you're having brunch here in california maybe you're slacking off at work after your lunch break in new york or you're having breakfast in hawaii it seems to kind of hit the right targets so um so listen we are here to talk about uh a new player that dropped was it last week it was only last week it wasn't even a week ago it feels like a long time and you know why it feels like a long time ago because i've been seeing so much discussion about baseline generator just in the last four days it really seems to have struck a nerve with people in a in a cool way and i think when i saw the first demo for it i my first comment was this is going to be useful for a lot of people i was really excited about it myself included you know i talk about this i released a tutorial video and i say that like you know i'm not immune from struggling with baselines myself you know it's it can be a kind of tricky thing to get right and this player has just really leveled up i think what i do but also i think of a lot of other people and i'm seeing what they're doing and people have been putting out videos on youtube and there's been clips on instagram and stories and all sorts of stuff we've been seeing and it's just been this flurry of activity that's been really cool really fun to see and we're gonna dig into it uh even further today in fact i have you know sometimes it'll be me and matthias this time we've gone for a threesome because we really have uh i mean i may i might over hype him but i i don't think so he might humbly under hype himself um that i would call him the brains behind baseline generator uh the the inspiration behind it and really uh one of the key drivers that made it as cool as it is so we're going to talk to him and we're going to bring him on right now this is ludwig carlson ludwig say hello to the internet hey have i have i over hyped you or under hyped have i gotten my is it goldilocks just right i i think you're uh yeah okay i've been deeply involved you have these line generators thank you so much this is that is very unsweetish of you to to uh joe you know what actually yeah i have been very involved in this that's uh and it's correct you you really have been uh the key drive so much so that when i've gone to matthias early on during the development when i went to matthias i had questions he got like ask ask ludwig i don't i mean i he knows better than me all this stuff so um so let's talk a little bit about baseline generator i wanna we're obviously gonna show baseline generator give people some tips and some tricks but i think it's probably worth uh taking a step all the way back to the why of baseline generator why did this happen and uh why is a player you know and and sort of just where it all came from you know sure i mean the decision always comes from matthias doesn't it but but in some way but but the many players we felt we had first of all we really like doing players because players are you know you get very close to the music with the player uh you kind of you can really do some difference to the actual notes coming out and that's that's fun it's fun to and also we kind of we like the thing you know creating giving inspiration and making you know creating new ideas that's that's kind of one of the key things we like to do and players are excellent for that but we felt i mean we already have what is it two at least two drum players right right beat map and drum sequence and we have the the the poly step which is like more like for chords and stuff like that we have an arpeggiator we have petty mutate which is like you could probably do baselines with it but it doesn't really help you do that you sort of have to bring the baseline to the player and then then it'll take it further right yeah we didn't have something specifically for base so that was kind of the starting point plus the fact that we knew that in base it's it's not always easy right to do base so it's a good thing to to look into what i love about these players when whenever you guys so when in recent i think it was at nine nine i think we introduced players right reason 9.0 and um when we did it we introduced three players originally scales and chords dual arpeggio and node echo yep and i in my limited non-product designer mind was like great we got it all covered we did it guys we're perfect and just the beginning it's just the beginning and then so every time one comes out i'll go like oh yeah drum sequencer oh that's actually that is a super handy okay well now we got it cool cross players off the list we've done it and we're good to go we got the whole collection and then pattern mutator comes out and i go oh right of course of course you want to do that and so this was another one it was just like a massive blind spot well as soon as you guys said i was like oh yeah of course of course we we should have a baseline player and um and i hope hopefully it's as for people out there these are as surprising i think there's something about them it's not just maybe the obvious oh we need something to generate baselines but actually really your specialty and i think partially if i i hate to toot our own horn here but i do think i'm gonna say this as a as a reason user of many years not as a reason studios guy um i have always been impressed with the design decisions that you guys have been making for years so far before my tenure began with the company and this is another one of those things where it's like of course you can make baselines but to do it in the right way and the way that you came up with the solution you came up with is really really elegant and uh maybe we could talk a little bit about that what how did it how do you approach you had the idea we need to help people make baselines but where do you what's your next step well we had a few like requirements that we came up with we didn't want it to be random for example because like you know like quad note generator it generates random stuff it won't sound the same the next time you go back to it but for a baseline reader you really you really want it to sound the same you set it and then it should stay that way so that it couldn't be randomly generated also if you do random stuff you can get interesting things but you typically don't get bass lines bass lines are not random really they are right they have might have a strong root note might have a strong downbeat and some yeah there's a kind of form to bass lines which there might be many forms but there are lots and lots of note sequences that won't work very well for right lines this is a classical i know as a guitarist there's a sort of truism that basis always think which is that basis will say all guitarists think they can play bass because it's like it's you know similar and you know it's got frets and i can use a pick and i can you know it's the same tuning it's just only four strings i can do that but to think like a bassist and bass lines are actually a whole unique thing unto themselves they're not i mean they can be melodic but they're not melodies and they can be you know they can be chordal but they're not chord progressions you know they are their own thing sure exactly they to me a good baseline kind of has a direction you know it travels and it kind of pushes forward in some way there are a lot of baselines that are that don't do that but i don't find them very interesting you see what i mean by because and that brings me to you know let me back up a little bit because we wanted to find a way to kind of yeah we couldn't actually just do it parametrically from we couldn't come up with rules that create baselines out of nothing because we could probably but our the results weren't very good so we didn't do that so we found out okay we want to start with existing baselines we're going to do some some stuff and then we're going to kind of mutate them or let the user change them or mix them or in some way right yeah make them their own so you you don't you you don't want to get the feeling that you're kind of i don't know using a loop player or something like that right you there's a certain element um you know when someone i i remember there someone making this comparison once to certain music making tools where they said that um if you go back 50 years in photography taking a photo was a a fairly complicated process you had to understand the relationship between the lenses and the light that's coming in and this the amount of silver particles on your film that you were shooting on and how long to expose that relative to its sensitivity and how changes on the camera would affect focus settings like it was a lot to it that you were doing then the instamatic camera came out and you could point at something click a button and it figured out the correct all of that and figured it out and just took your picture and what happened when you did that in a lot of ways a lot of the complexity was removed but what wasn't removed was the sense of ownership that you got in that i took this book this is my photograph i you know people that take photos on their phone now they don't go like oh well the camera did all the work i mean the phone did all the work i didn't you know i just pointed at the lens right they still take the artistic ownership of what they have created and in a similar way i think the players like this one and there's some others out there too as well beatmap being one of those two has that same relationship where it's yes it's removing complexity but it's still retaining the artistry and the ownership of what you do with it so that when you're done you don't feel like you didn't just load up a midi loop and go like okay that's my bass line you can actually really craft it exactly clever i was going to ask you there's a there's a picture so i've got a couple of pictures i wanted to to chat with you about this um i have some of those early we put these up on the blog and so i i brought them up here so we've got this early iteration referred to as bass face can you tell us a little bit about bass space and was it was this the first design test i mean this is not a proper design this is just like a sketch i did but but we did prototypes of it of that basically um the thing here is that we kind of try to split the bass lines into rhythm and pitch so you could have independent control over the rhythm and which pictures we're playing with some kind of xy thing you see pattern and mask we used to kind of gate mask that was right okay i don't know kind of deciding where in the pattern should i so my notes play and where should it be silent and so on it didn't work it sucked pretty much it no it didn't suck but it turned out only a few combinations seem to work so so we left we abandoned that idea because the thing is you don't want weird pictures all over the place and you it didn't really it didn't really gel how do you know when you're in this process how do you know when like how do you not get pulled into that sunk cost fallacy of like we've been working on this design for two weeks and it's not there yet do we are we just a week away from seeing the success of this design or when do we scrap it and go at it with a different approach yeah um but it depends i would say i mean it depends on how house hurry we you know what what kind of state of harry we are in and so on and what and also how far i mean i will i had a feeling that we were on the right track so worked on we had some good results but we just this particular you know this this combination of rhythm and pitch that didn't really work and all that thing you saw under the the two xy pads there was an early idea of mine which didn't really it wasn't really necessary it was a way to yeah that weird kind of display down there with the reflected steps the chromosome display or oh yeah yeah um that just so that was a way to kind of create patterns that repeated but was slightly different each you know everything every second time or something like that but it wasn't necessary so so um no well luckily we had the time to kind of go back to the drawing board and think a little bit more about it and so your your second uh iteration if you want to call a sort of milestone iteration um still this is still a sketch wireframe right this isn't a absolutely device our graphic designer andy it's not involved in these weird attempts i just have to say to defend him i mean he does the actual things and then and also of course a lot of the design the actual uh graphic user interface design that that's him because he's it's very very experienced he's basically done every single recent studios device right almost almost all right yeah yeah so this is much closer because we have come up with a beat and the unbeaten offbeat it says beat here but it's the same thing sure we don't have that diamond shape but just two big knobs for him instead but it does the same thing basically and we also came up with having some kind of sequencer display separating the pitch curve and the the notes right right actually this is pretty is it pretty close to what we have there are some things right this would if we if we weren't so lucky as to have andy this could be a functional version as we know it of a baseline generator so exactly it's uh everybody should send him uh flowers and chocolate for making our reason rack that much prettier i mean i mean we we are continuously when we do this we are continuously kind of developing and discussing and bringing things to the table and the so it's mathias and andy and i and also niklas backlund of robotic bean who's been at that point he was already involved but i just had to stress one thing because at an early stage it's pretty much pretty fun because we have the the new combinator the updated combinator for reason 12. yeah that makes a huge difference i mean i use it for prototyping i've actually i did the prototypes in as combinator patches early on to uh using using pattern mutator as a as a built-in sequencer actually to just try you fed the bass lines into pattern mute like you yeah i recorded bass actually at the pattern mutator and i made combinators after that and just tried all the accommodations and how things worked so before we did actual rack extensions we just did combinator patches interesting they couldn't do everything of course but it could you could get a sense of what what worked and what didn't right right well so should we maybe we should pop the actual device up uh on our screen here and and kind of instead of looking at wireframes and sketches um maybe we'll actually look at the the real baseline generator talk a little bit about what it is now a lot of people will have seen our tutorial video that we put out last thursday but not everybody will so maybe we'll kind of give people a quick uh what do you call it a a once-over as to what it is and then we'll we'll start digging into um exactly some extra fun things we can do with it so it's cold out here says matias is he is he wanting in on the fun yes he is it's cold all right matthias all right all right you want to come you want to say hello i'm bringing you on for a second let me get your screen up uh while i've talked to matthias [Music] [Laughter] i was i was hanging out with you you were having too much fun you're i would just i could just hang out with you super fun mathias we had such a fantastic time yeah i know okay fine well now now you're here what do you got to say well you got you got something you need to add i got nothing all right now let's look at baseline generators i've been looking at questions in the chat um there's a lot of fun stuff to talk about living before i uh bring you uh bring your screen on i'm noticing off to the side that you're you want to share just reason only because you've got the whole uh your whole monitor going and when if i switch over to it now we're going to get sucked into a feedback vortex of visuals i think i only have reason i believe i think i do let me try again my screen says otherwise all right there it is there there you go okay sorry now it's there okay so uh here i'm going to pop this up on screen here okay so i i'm going to leave it to you to try to describe this a little bit but maybe just kind of give people the the the need to know quick once over of really what baseline generator is how it works and what's kind of happening maybe behind the scenes so they understand kind of the mechanics we'll see you in two hours then no sorry i'm kidding okay so um right i just started by adding a monotone bass synthesizer which would sound something like this [Music] mute your mic you're typing see this is what happens when you come on too early horrible so i just i just i'll just walk out of here no no just meet your mom no no no no i just added a baseline generator here okay cool and this loads like the the default patch which sounds like this just so you can hear it but if you skip the default patch and go back to the very yeah you're just going to reset the device like this then we're going back to a very very basic and simple pattern which would sound something like this [Music] and you right away can notice that down here we have green and blue notes or dots or whatever you should call them they are actually notes and the green ones are reflected up here it says on beat and the blue ones are off beat and this is kind of the key to how we how we kind of you know how you reconstruct bass lines out of whatever is in here so the on beat that means things that are on the eighth notes like even stuff i can we can turn down the velocity and turn off off bit all the way so you can just just hear that it's a good trick to know actually that you can turn down velocity and they're off right yeah i didn't i hadn't picked up on that it says all fair right so because damn it just get me i've never learned to read ludwig no sorry you've just outed me anyway so uh as you might have heard over the insane laughters we that was very straightforward just eighth notes no sync hopes no is that a word syncopes it's it is in sweden yeah it's no syncope didn't know syncope syncopes uh maybe people out there that are more uh all right theory-minded concern co-op in swedish anyway so uh if we instead turn off the the on beat we only listen to the off beat those are the notes that sit in between on the like off 16th notes yeah this is gonna sound really weird because you only hear those right it's not really useful on its own but i might am i correctly saying that these are the notes that really kind of give a bass line kind of its interest it's uh it's feel yeah at least if you want it to be like funky or or right driving i talked about direction earlier that the way a bass line kind of strives forward and and also kind of pushes against the beat because the beat is fairly straight here right really really simple you know what i thought i said often this i think that's when i was doing the tutorial i thought about um the uh another one bites the dust baseline is this interesting thing where it's half of it is on the beaten half of it's off the beat so you got a dun dun dun that's all playing off these upbeats and it's it becomes interesting because you realize it's the back half that makes that interesting if it was just done done done and vice versa if you would remove the proper exactly we'll see this in many patterns actually both me and the play a lot of music of course i play a bit of bass and other plays bass with all instruments he can get his hands on i think and that was like a key thing that like a good baseline they tend to kind of have an important like this beat matters right right matters and this is the thing that bass players do in not instinctively necessarily but they do it it's based on years of experience and i think that's what's interesting about the lines that are fed into baseline generator as a starting point were fed from your experience i mean they're they're baselines that you play we had we had some outside help as well but but yeah we can't they're human but they're human baselines they're not they're not algorithmic and they're not random and they are based on the experience of bass players who understand that on and off relationships yeah and the reason for that actually is is because we found out that that worked best even though you kind of split let's say we we record a bass line that sounds something there's a mix of unbeaten offbeat notes and then we split that and make make two separate one on beat and one offbeat pattern and they might not end up on the same number here they might sit in different places on these scales because they are kind of sorted on on how dense and how many notes there i'll be coming there but the interesting thing is that since they were made together and they actually started out as a proper really play the bass line they kind of work for some reason uh i i wouldn't have been able to do that just by kind of guessing and plotting right and drawing notes that's what killed all the all the kind of random generation ideas too because there were too many like instinctive little rules and and baseline things right that's just randomly generated you know play them it's like you just play them exactly when i'm trying to learn swedish and i ask someone a grammar rule how do you know it's this and not that you're like you just know you i don't know how to tell you i just you know um it's these things you learn as you as you're gonna of course that that's all based in this case i mean on listening to a lot of music over the you've certainly played in your fair share of bands and particularly with a certain emphasis on kind of these feel-based and funk-based type of jazz as well you know um really things that have essentially it's going to happen i'm going to just be known to funk i'm going to fly through a couple of comments here um just i want to see make sure oh yeah so um rh was asking is it any good for drum and bass um that's a i think that very much depends on the type of drum and bass that you do i mean the traditional kind of you know old-school drum and bass that i tend to like they often just have long notes right and it's really the base sound that does it it's yeah right it just goes through the entire track yeah oh i see so there's something yeah the dmp drone base here and there's also another one called rumbling the jungle high bpm which is something i i won't be able to kind of showcase it now because i don't have paper like rhythm loops or whatever right right i think it can definitely do those but in many cases i mean to be perfectly honest sometimes you don't need that we talked a lot in the beginning about what baseline generator is supposed to do right and two things we kind of removed from the equation was a base that was simply functional so base that simply tried to follow along with the chords and the structure of your song uh you know playing particular note of the chord yeah exactly what you're really doing if you're just holding a note from the entire measure on the root note of the chord yeah like you don't need a player just having like eighth note right then you don't really need our help i think it's more like okay let's let's figure out the chords i beg to differ i didn't need your help i just didn't know i needed it on purpose try to not not be that really right i don't think it can do the the very basic like pop com pop rhythm you know i don't like something from the 60s or something i don't i don't think we can maybe it can of course it can i mean you can you can clearly draw in the notes notes but you're right but then you're just using any other sequencer right but that's really important actually so based on generator was kind of made for you know music and genres where the bass line was more or less prominent and important right that's still a wide range i see a lot of people saying like techno and acid bass lines which honestly most of the raw material was the complete opposite direction there was a lot of funk and soul right those kinds of bass lines i could should be surprised of course tend to be quite similar actually gary in the comments says it's great for dmb so gary uh assume has made some dmb with it says it's great for dmb also um another question to to make sure we're clear on this avenue says this baseline generation is synced with tempo yes it is yes um and and you can you can hear when ludwig actually uh i keep interrupting us from actually playing but when he does play um there's a little drum beat there that's that's happening um courtesy of reason as well and and everything is synced up with tempo absolutely i see swedish hot synth quintet is in the comments asking if it's good for stuff from the 20s [Laughter] if you didn't know that's analog sint orchestra yeah we've been playing vintage jazz on video synthesizers since 1998. so cool anyway uh so let's get back to the yes yes yeah sure so i started with let me start over so i just gonna start from this very very very very sparse [Music] now a way i like to use this i can of course just do it like this and drag in the diamond but maybe if you want to really find something you you like you might want to try just do one thing at a time start with the on beat and see where that takes you see so like this so maybe i'm gonna [Music] that's interesting i'm gonna take that one and then i'm going to kind of move just do the same thing with the offbeat here and see what we can [Music] it was okay it's effective in its own way okay that that's something at least so now at that point i can start maybe doing stuff with velocity and note length like i'm going to zoom in just so people realize what you're doing there so the velocity are those changes were you changing the knob or were you changing them directly in the sequencer oh you're changing the noise changing the the knob so it's just like a velocity scale control for the on beat and for the offbeat and that's a global is that a global setting for all on beat and yeah it scales it scales whatever is in the actual yeah oh i see so if you've got two different green notes but different velocities they'll go up but they'll go relative to each other yeah okay cool yeah because the the baseline the patterns that are in there have velocity information so it's not like they have nothing but you scale it up and down so and you can actually see that because you see this those black the bigger the black dot is the the higher the velocity so this last note is pretty it's pretty intense now you can i think you can hear that yeah all right so i can change the note length a little bit as well [Music] okay it works actually i'm curious what happens if i raise this pattern length the number of steps to 64 instead which is the maximum [Music] not much oh it went down at the end so is it that these patterns were written as 64 length patterns and then okay so there may if you see a pattern and there's 32 there may be something behind the below the fold or behind the curtain or whatever you want to say right but you might want to go down even further right related to that i just i'll throw the question at you because i've seen it come up in the comments a couple times people are asking um are there do we do you think that it'll ever go to less than 16 some people seem to want eight steps only and that's there yeah well yes um yeah yeah that in retrospect we should have done that and maybe that will come as well um i i i agree we had we had a discussion about that and we had kind of different opinions let's leave yeah but being the resident techno sequencer i was no it's not really about that it was just like i felt coming from my perspective the the bass lines didn't kind of it didn't really become bass lines until you had a bar there's one thing yeah i'll show a bit of that later when i do some demoing but you'll find actually that if you turn down the length to say eight instead you're you're not left with much like these bass lines are written as as like you said as bass lines with uh really focus on the root note and the octaves and the kind of fifth and the seventh and you'll find that you get very very s kind of similar starting points for example if you go down to eight i would almost think that by the time you're at eight you could be doing that in pattern mutator and sort of rolling your own without too much effort but yeah especially when you go down to four or five right right and stuff but um definitely a cool thing a little housekeeping here uh one question uh is this only available with reason plus the answer is no it's available in our shop as well as an add-on for reason and that's true of reason 10.5 and up right am i correct in my assumption i think it's 10.2 but 10.2 thank you that's what that's one point it's like an auction do i hear 10.0 10. go on 10.1 okay so let me show you one more thing before if it was okay yeah could i just there's another great question that came in i want to answer somebody asked about the velocity which we didn't we sort of took for granted that everybody understands what's happening there they said is the velocity like bending the tone and um okay no uh but it's patch dependent right what the way velocity impacts a sound is so velocity just means the well go ahead you you're the expert yeah it's like every midi note has a velocity value and that kind of originally like emulates how hard you were playing on a piano or something so and that what what that does that that that depends on the instrument you're playing and the settings there so you can have a note with low velocity and that typically can sound a little bit weaker or darker in if the filter changes with velocity as in this case or it could do something else or it could sometimes it doesn't do anything at all because the the instrument isn't set up that way i can actually show you let let me just play this again yeah so if i [Music] turn off velocity like this all notes will sound the same now i can turn up the blaster here instead so things got quieter now because now i decided to let the velocity affect the level the amplifier oh i see amplitude and i don't want that i want my base to be loud and strong but i want it to change tone character depending on how hard i play a little bit i'm going to show you more about that it's something you can basically say that higher velocity is typically more intense sound yeah right right you'll find in just the well-designed patches it's not just level then it will something more will happen maybe the filter the sound that he heard as bending the note as he described it was the filter relationship that sort of gave this the sound a little bounce to it when it from the the filter changing okay cool okay carry on all right so now i felt okay this is okay but i want to take it further and see what happens and we got something called the variators those are probably the the hardest to to understand that in the beginning but it's basically a way to use other numbers in the same baseline now i have number eight here number 26 the on beat is 8 and off bit is 26. all well and good but let's say that i want in the second half of this pattern i want to go to another on beat pattern and i can do that by first of all selecting a variator shape that's tells me that okay the second half of the pattern i'm going to do some i'm going to change i'm going to change to another number then i'm going to turn it up here and you can see up here that we're actually moving a kind of a range if i go down instead i will go to the other direction like this but and that basically means that after half the pattern i will select another it it will select another on beat for me so now it will sound completely different in the second half of the pattern so even though we're seeing in the diamond i'm sorry even though we're seeing 8 26 representing the diamond what we're kind of going to be hearing is more 8 26 and maybe 15 26 or whatever the number ends up being right right exactly okay so so now we're still on the number eight and now [Music] that kind of turned out like two different bass lines struck together that might not be what we want you can also select that you only want to vary the very this the last quarter of the of the pattern oops sorry my bad [Music] no i cannot keep missing here him i'm just being stupid sorry [Music] a little upwards motion a little bit disco at the end but then i'm not very happy about this thing at the end so i'm going to do some variation here as well at the variator shape for the offbeat this is a ramp so it's going to continuously change from the half from the second half of the pattern i'm going to change it maybe like this looked interesting [Music] okay you can go on like this until you find something fun there are no guarantees sometimes you find stuff that are not so inspiring of course but then the nice thing is you can just i mean that's kind of the point here [Music] i'm not really happy about that you can also do have variator shapes that do two changes during the course of the pattern that's where the the okay the 25 to 50 mark and then the 75 to 100 right so in this case it would do let's take that one instead this will kind of do change this part and then this part so uh it's kind of it it does changes to two times over the pattern and this is kind of it's so hard to explain in words but i think if you just yeah play around with it a little bit it's i think what you need to think about is really that it changes the pattern to another pattern by fusing different ones right and they generally do that at the end of the pattern someone asked in the comments before if oh why can't i do that in the beginning of the pattern you kind of can because it's inverted too right you can go to the more busy thing at the top and then turn the amount down sure we could we could absolutely add shapes that do the stuff in the beginning of the pattern the thing is that this comes from how you think at least how i think about bass lines that you kind of as you said mattias you anchor them in the beginning you kind of anchor them and then you vary them at the end so that's why they are shaped this way that's just the boots but but matthias does offer a it's something i hadn't thought of so i'm just going to highlight it because that is for people that for whatever reason want to have maybe a busy variation at the top half and a simple variation at the um a biter dusts another one like you know right i'm flipping the words for people who want to do that they they could set a high number on their default setting and then actually dial back the amount knob for more simple things yeah which which will lead to yeah more bass in the in the beginning less busy in the end right which is which sometimes it's really cool i i think it comes it comes to a point as when you want to do a very very specific thing eventually you want to ah but i i just kind of oh if the beginning was more like this right that's when you actually go into the note display and you know remove notes and add them right right and re-pitch them right that's why we added it too i think bass lines much more than than what what bitmap did really needed to have a sequencer for the kind of define control the like it's it's almost exactly how i want it and i want to put my own touch and i want to just this little note right right uh a question from evans he's asked um any patterns for club music i think we're going to be hearing some stuff you'll hear quite a few yeah yeah or edm stylist says yeah so um and again i want to reiterate that i think what we found out when we when we started using this and trying the patterns is that the patterns for for club and edm and funk and house and and neosoul and whatever they weren't actually that different they were often the sounds that were different or the length i mean i was actually surprised because if you took like some funky a little bit house something something pattern and then you turn the tempo down to 80 something and then you kind of just moved up the release on your base synth and then worked pretty well as like a hip-hop or something slow funk it was the same basically it did no big difference and you probably had an 808 right sound to it or something there are some that kind of surprised me a little bit there's some comments from some people um that are uh requesting new bass sounds so maybe this is a a good transitional point um for us i actually have one thing i would like to show you if you're if you're okay with it because i tried to do some electric bass sound i just took the reason you'll need to hang on a second if you're switching windows you'll need to uh stop and reshare with a new window that's hello everyone big screen big screen we're on the big screen now yeah all right no worries i'll just check in um with the comments so related to that somebody's asking for electric bass i think we're going to get there because people have asked about um you know in my tutorial i use sort of synth basses and so people were asking in the comments on that video how does it do when it's uh dealing with electric bass so um okay cool we are with you now uh we're looking at oh there you go i'll write on cue electric bass right happily it even says electric face this is electric maze reason like the bass the classic instrument uh so it sounds something like this i just selected 1817 which turned out pretty okay so [Music] some kind of i don't know slightly funky but and now i try to do the variator thing i selected variator shapes like this and i i have actually preset these so i wouldn't have to look for them so now things are not happening a little bit but even better i found that if i could turn up the note range i haven't talked about that note range basically expands the range from the root note and up or kind of brings it all together closer to the root note right so and you can see it's not very scientific it's literally just further away or closer yeah but it stays in some kind of musically reasonable intervals at least so yeah it's going to sound all weird but but it might sound wrong in another way like this [Music] i don't really want this video game music this very very happy notes like that yeah you don't want that don't do it i know that's great and that's why we have this minor-ness thing which basically decides that oh you can't have no you can't have the the major seventh that will be that become the minor seventh and you can't have the major third that will become the mine are you and so on and the sixth and the second this will be fair enough you can actually see the nose move in there you're right that and peter's asking just are you saying what is the small grill under the diamond that is exactly what we're talking about i'm going to zoom into a disgusting resolution here yeah but this is a yeah this is you cannot actually do anything it it sort of illustrates what's happening with both with note range and with the minor-ness because as you see some some intervals are kind of forced to their lower version so it's a feedback thing just a like a visual feedback just to let you know yes and that i like to say that it's also because it looks a little bit interesting and cool this is a an andy thing and i like it a lot yeah but but but it doesn't really i mean it it might help you and see what's going on a little bit but you're not you're it's not something where you click and re-route no dots or anything like that no right exactly so now it sounds like this which i thought found pretty cool so this is the same no range is up but minorness is up ooh all right let's let's listen to that for a second i like that turnaround [Music] exactly [Music] it's giving me the less clay proof vibes [Music] right so that's and i have one more electric bass example actually i'm going to do this stop sharing again are you ready oh i i will be i am ready i will be now we're going to change the to this one and here we go again right um okay okay cool i'm going back to cali okay here we go right this again electric bass it's the same sound actually without auto wow but so now we're going down to much lower tempo [Music] let's see what was what was the fountain here yeah i had some offbeat variated here as well this is a good example of this is like not club music this is and it's not funk either it's like just it's just a basis laying down a feel behind a band i think it's a just a good utilitarian baseline and i want to show you two interesting things here uh on the back i just pressed tab for those of you who were surprised uh to flip the rack around and on the back we have some cv outputs as we usually have on our devices series control voltage meaning you can connect things to and from the baseline generator for various interesting results i know that matthias is going to talk about a bit more about that later but so we have the the gate and node cv outputs here and you can use those to to connect another device if you like to control two devices at the same time so i did this so just to get some i'm going to bring up the level for this [Music] so [Music] nice in a way yeah yeah so now it this one plays both the electric bass and the algorithm i'm getting flashbacks to when i was like 11 or 12 and i got the roland i think it was gr09 guitar synthesizer and i could i put a midi pickup on my guitar and i was like this is great i'm now i can play piano on my guitar and then i tried it and then i realized i hadn't yet asked the question should i play piano on my guitar the answer is no hello yeah seriously yes that's right but for bass no actually in all seriousness for bass it's actually an entirely different thing the idea that you could layer synth stuff with bass and real bass and synth bass actually it's a classic cool sound so to be able to do that it's actually fun but let me instead connect it to this i have a like an nxt sampler with a slap bass sound loaded i'm trying so hard not to say the the phrase the old uh [Laughter] all right all right but i'm going to move it instead of the regular gate up i'm going to put it on the accent gate output and the accent in this case means that it only sends out the gate signal whenever the velocity of a node is above 110 the maximum is 127 so only the loud nodes will trigger this one now so i don't think there are any loud notes so far but but here comes the opportunity to actually do some editing i'm just going to drag up here on this yep okay so i get that that's like the pop sort of sound of like not the slap but the actual the pop yeah it should be like a pop it doesn't really sound perfect what's that thing you called with not the slap but the other thing it's the slap and the pop is it called a pop okay i'm asking our resident uh slap expert in the comments over there well it is a ponytail right so that was one thing you could do at least you can actually yeah there's a there's a sneaky way to kind of trigger two things with one baseline generator dynamically right exactly that is interesting that is really interesting and of course not just for slap pass you could you could do that with anything right it could trigger a drum hit or a cord or anything yeah i've been using it to to just trigger um to raise the amount of reverb briefly like a reverb sound so you get on the loud notes you get like an extra sport reverb you know another bass sound uh not not necessarily done as an accent thing but maybe as an accent i know a lot of things a lot of times uh trap producers like to take their 808 baselines and layer a kick on it so every time you get a a kick yeah sort of transient on top of your i mean it's it's almost funny to say that you get a you get a kick on top of your 808 bass because like anyway bass is based on a kick but you know what i mean yeah yeah i think um yeah i think that's i think you need to see something else now though okay adam adam says oh wait that was not the one adam says there is no one term for uh what we just talked about so uh oh here we go wait wait wait wait wait you got more info a pull a thump a slap etcetera okay there we go also just maybe no best possible timing now you'll also probably hear a very excited cat greeting my girlfriend come home so i'm going to try to focus on the baseline generator okay are you ready for me i am one step ahead of you yeah thank you pull your screen down so what we're switching over matthias are you um you got some stuff i i think i do yeah i want to show some uh some kind of using and abusing the baseline generator yeah some kind of tidbits that you didn't cover in your excellent tutorial this is something we talked about when when the three of us were discussing this live stream and sort of tossing around thoughts and ideas of what we might talk about in the show and i i have a vested interest in showing people ways to misuse uh all i always like showing people ways to misuse devices or maybe maybe maybe misuse this the wrong term but sort of push what the obvious use is for a device into something else and i i think hopefully matthias you're gonna show us some of that stuff um a little bit yeah so i'm now looking at your screen yes you are uh a little zoomed in part of my screen so basically what i wanted to kind of show was some of the cv connections in a in a different way than ludwig did basically what they could just do to add something to your sound uh i've i've got some help here from the compare cv scope oh sorry same person who's uh helped us do the baseline generator nicholas buckland from robotic bean oh yeah robotic bin sorry i mix up the names there uh so what i'm gonna show you is just using these outputs to control things on the synth i'll remove them for now so don't look at them and basically this is the the line that i have going [Music] not supremely exciting but the rhythm is pretty good i like it yeah what i want is kind of to change up how the groove works with the sound rather than the actual the actual notes i think that's really important for many genres rusty says sorry rusty is saying uh what i was referring to is off label use i think that's correct yeah exciting to do some offline waves yeah so i've prepared some just see the inputs here to oscillator mix and stuff but i'll remove this just so you can see from scratch what i'm doing i'm gonna route these cables i mean you would route them directly to what you wanted to try right you wanna go oh i wanna control those little mix but just for the purpose of seeing what's going on i'm gonna write uh root them through the cv scopes oh so this is this is a just a visualizer for us today yep not a very quiet output here and then there so what does this mean well it means that now if i play this back you can see this red scope line you can follow it makes sense yeah but it mostly makes sense but walk me through like i'm an idiot because what you're actually going you're sending the tide gate output so this is just sending a gate it's just a gate it's not actually setting yeah so it's a yeah it's a signal that's high or low okay that's up or down okay and that's being said correct me if i'm wrong a little bit because i'm not exactly sure but when uh there's a tied note uh that the changes pitch so not when it's tied like this but when it's tied from a pitch to another pitch i have that here and here and here and here and that's great because suddenly you can add some accents when you do like a slide it was added so that when two notes are changing you can you know turn on a slide thing or change something that does turn on portamento but i like to use it for just other things wait but hang on because i've seen a lot of comments of people asking if there was a slide function and you're saying this is your gateway to slide town well there are many things that like the most common gateway to slide is that most synths especially in reason have portamento auto and auto just means that if you have a tight note that changes pitch it will apply portamento i see so that is slightly that is that's generally in the instrument but anyway i want this light to be more pronounced so that's yeah exactly so open the filter when it's light let's do that actually so i'll just take this to the filter frequency and i'll turn down actually i can do this on this thing instead so [Music] now it opens the filter when it slides which you know it doesn't do a lot of difference what i like to do is kind of use it for something big so i'm going to use it for oscillator mix which just means it will go from i see just hearing the first one here thank you for doing this at the rate of my learning because i'm getting this yeah okay to this fifth that's what i want to do so now whenever i do a slide it actually changes to the fifth the other oscillator now to me this instantly has like moved into like you know the sort of like justice cross era bass lines yeah there's a lot of that kind of mixing between sounds yeah the mixing between the best example was a lot of that yeah uh i'll take some more like the accent gate out wolf cry says this sort of he says did he turn it into an envelope follower that's sort of what ended up i mean not really but that to the listener that might be a similar sort of effect that you were getting when you had that hooked up to the filter that there was a a a rhythmic filter action that sort of felt a bit envelopy but it wasn't actually envelopy i'm going to use the the accent gate out that ludwigia's show too and i'm going to use that to control the noise level so basically whenever the velocity is really high you can see some notes here i'll turn up the noise you can follow that on the blue trace so another kind of [Music] good point so let's go back it becomes a little bit of an accent there and it doesn't have to be dispronounced and then it's good to know that uh of course we just we can have a lot of cv that makes sense and that is related to this but we also have several proponents of random cv in the office including myself and the visual designer and um luckily also can i throw it again we all like that can i throw a curveball again um yeah briggs says needs distortion so if we can if i can put in a request to add some distortion at some point i'll do some filter drive instead you'll have to live with the filter drive i don't want to go overboard but basically baseline generator also generates one random cv signal that's the same length as the sequence both as a bipolar so it goes both positive and negative or unipolar so i'm going to use those two so the unipolar and use that to control the fm level and the let's take the other one and do the filter i guess so now you can follow what's happening like if you look at this little section here that you have put comments on now so maybe it's hard to see i'll move it but here you'll see the cv signals coming out of baseline generator and you can hear the difference in the bass sound where it moves the filter it adds some noise it adds a bit of the fm envelope and it changes the oscillator mix [Music] you can unmute drones now i think it is time to unmute drums you get a much more kind of dynamic bass line by using those different signals right now this is the kind of thing you know when i when i listened to music or certainly when i was learning and i think even still to this day i might hear a line like that and assume that it's multiple synths on multiple tracks right you know that noise is his own little accent track and maybe there's a filter sound and then there's the the unfiltered sound that's the power of modulation uh and i'll i'll get into another trick because that's a cool bass line but someone asked before about shifting the pattern which we generally think is a good idea and we're a little bit sad we didn't get to it yeah but there are plenty of ways around that some uh do it a certain way some do it another way and i'll show you a few because i have an idea for the rest of this little track so to make this 100 clear for people uh watching so one of the things people have said when using this is they they like the baseline but they might like it they'd like it to start on the fourth step of the baseline or the the 40th step of a baseline to sort of re-center where it's sitting and i think that's what you're talking about right away exactly so just completely ignoring all the time we spent on getting the one right now just kind of shifting things around but the good thing about players i think is that they're kind of building on each other they're stackable uh there's a bunch of nice things you can do but i'm gonna actually just copy this entire stack i'm gonna remove this cv thing which i don't think i need so now it's just the very same baseline with the very same base sound but without the modulation okay i guess here i think it's fun to use a bunch of things but note echo has kind of sailed up as a real hit in the office when we've tried this because what you can do is basically shift the note line so in this case i'll tempo sync and this means that every little echo of this bass line will be you know in sync with the song a quarter note in this case right and i won't pitch it so it will be the same pitch and i'll just repeat it once uh if you didn't know you know these repeats in no tech you can actually turn them off and on which is pretty nice to get rhythmic delays right you can do that with the dry signal too so to speak so now it's basically just shifted a quarter note in time because that's the the step length setting you have exactly so it says i'll see if you can see on the screen yes you can so now if i play this you'll just have the same bass line delayed with almost the same sound which is just messy because it's the same sound but imagine if you will that you race it an octave and you change this sound to something else that i prepared because i'm like a chef and now you'll get this column response thing from you know the same baseline being played so just so we've got the original the base we were working with is still happening yep and then down below we're working on a copy okay and i don't even have to change it an octave here i can actually funnily enough change it to an octave in the note that go in case but it doesn't really matter either way but you get this call and response kind of rhythm [Music] you can hear it kind of triggering off each other right [Music] and this of course gets more fun if you add a little bit of effects so i'll quickly add some reverb and some delay from my sense film score and warm echo classics okay [Music] so here you're getting this kind of interplay between them right [Music] then of course you could go in and change some of these look let's say you want to kind of change the rhythm around a bit and say this go up to a g maybe and this one kind of goes up to a high c here and a tip if you didn't know shift means you get a better control over the the pitch display oh when you're moving moving the notes yeah so you can do it to get slowly more granular resolution on your mouse space find exactly what you want cool i love this being uh being up in this octave you know so i one of the first things i actually did when i started playing with baseline generator was making lines that weren't based at all i was just moving the octaves up and it really became like rift generator hook generator right now right it had a lot of really just i think that's the key first like changing the octave and then i think just doing a little bit more yeah and also the thing you've done with the effects too i think that's something i noticed too is that if you left it pretty raw just sound like oh why is that bass playing so high but once you add some delay and some effects it suddenly becomes like a cool thing was that your camera yeah yes he's well aware that things are happening but let's listen to the music and not him i kind of started with the same bass line but now it's playing a bit differently right i'm back with some drums [Music] right uh another thing that i found really interesting like this note echo trick is nice uh for shifting uh but one of my real favorites right now is still the pattern mutator oh here's a cat where's he jumping yep he he turned on the music again i'm sorry about that he's very friendly he just wants to say hi all right we gotta for for your cat we gotta go full screen look at this guy what a weirdo well he just said someone someone someone just became a father during this video what he says look venus i got son my wife have birth during this video no we've been part of something great really wow born into a world where he will only know baseline generator yes so so please turn off this stream wow that is uh congratulations that's cool okay he now we've got of course of course now we've just got uh cat cat comments flooding in oh perfect circus podcast that cat is hella ugly yeah he's my new enemy you know perfect circus podcast whatever you want you won't get it but to show you a little bit about just pattern mutator in combination with baseline generator i think that's a really fun combo okay you can do a lot of stuff so and there you go got a tiny tiny dog what what name are we referring to the story freddy freddy there you go no it's actually it's freddie mercury oh right didn't you see i i can't believe i didn't catch the resemblance there all right sorry mathias sorry i got sucked into pets on screen basically i just wanted to to show that uh one cool thing that with pattern mutator in combination with this is that you can kind of capture ideas so like baseline generators very much built you know you do patterns and you find the nice one and you sequence it and if you do a variation you kind of go in and copy that to another pattern and do some variations and it's not really thought as a real-time thing like that it's more finding a nice bass line right but one thing you can do is shove a pattern mutator in between so if i just have this you can just turn on this pattern mutator and just record this and now i have this recorded version i just turned this off of what i just played you might notice that it's not recording the the glides the the what do you call it the overlapping notes yes that's that's a little bit of a of a design thing with how patent mutated works it just looks at which note is coming in right okay and maybe we could change that but the key thing is kind of getting the the actual note data because what i want to do is take this and do you know some effortless variations of the very same thing so i can turn on some swap and density and octave and this all kind of throws throws things around right [Music] pretty nice but even if we go back someone asks about shifting and lower length this can very much do just that right so you can see the length here right and go i'm gonna go 10 steps and now you've set up a poly rhythmic [Music] you can kind of keep taking whatever raw material you had right and another nice thing is even if you go up to the the length we can have this one can also shift so you can go okay so this is another method of pattern yes exactly pattern offset yeah it's another there are several methods like the most the some of the easiest methods involve of course getting the stuff down to the recent sequencer right just moving sure automating the pattern i really like stacking players like this right and there's been some discussion about um basically why there's no scale setting uh on the baseline generator scale setting not you don't mean note range because that's a form of scaling yeah yeah no rather rather like a c minor right okay smart scales keeping the notes in a certain scale yeah why is that i think it's it's worth talking about that because there's a couple of reasons well first and foremost i think this builds from uh baseline material and and as much as the rhythm is important the pitch is important like if you do i'm gonna have to get something to play on her here etcetera maybe remove some of the excessive delay so many of these like bass lines they wouldn't sound the same if you restricted them to scale and part of their character is that they have certain notes that are like going through so you can have right right this goes back to the non-scale notes this goes back to the notion that ludwig sort of came out early on in his development process which is that base is not um it it breaks rules and over the years a basis learns when and how to break those rules and one of them's or or none there's a little bit of that yeah yeah but the other thing is like the the things that sound the most good or the most useful in the most types of music tend to have a very restricted uh number of notes and a very similar number of notes and for the music we kind of looked at and aimed for there's a lot of electronic music a lot of hip-hop a lot of funk a lot of that kind of stuff right it it they had bass lines and not functional base it was really important to make sure that that was the center of the tension this doesn't mean we can't add it of course but that's kind of was thinking i don't know if people out there are watching this or not but but during the pandemic a very very famous uh session bassist for years named leland square lis glar he started putting out videos all i think on a daily basis where he would play through i mean he's played on so many songs and so he would just be like okay here's this you know doctor my eyes with uh jackson brown okay here's this james taylor here's a linda ronstadt like whatever he you know genesis i mean he's done a million things and he'll do these playthroughs where he plays the line that he played on those famous recordings and one thing i was struck by was how restrained he is in his no choice because of course he's got the chops to play the wildest craziest stuff but you watch him sitting in on these tracks and he's playing roots and fifths and octaves and you know the occasional fourth and and flat seventh and like they're they're really pretty yeah like you say it's a restrained set of choices that that he's making on all these songs and it's it was fascinating what we thought was we really wanted the baseline generator's core kind of promise to be that that the bass lines are are immediately kind of usable and sound good and something you kind of build from or add as a groove right right and since we have scales and chords built into reason that was part of the reason why we didn't add it too is like because it's really quite close to just go um but okay i'll do it in c major instead i mean in this case it doesn't even matter right because it's all fifths and quarters yeah right right which kind of makes that kind of my point the thing to kind of clarify what happens is if you have a bass line that are have a few intervals [Music] or something uh that sounds fair enough when you're playing in in c minor c dorian or whatever you are right now but then if you want to add a chord change to that so we changed it so we played this you want to go down yeah and then suddenly sound [Music] and it sounds like an old i don't know it doesn't sound like an harmonic pop you don't stay in the scale you suddenly move outside your scale so and that can of course become a problem and there but the thing is that either you can just add a scales and chords like mathias just did so you and force it to stay in the scale you mean you can still play a ch change the root note but the notes coming out will stay in that particular group of notes that that is a scale right or you could say okay this type of music might not work very well with that type of of bass line for example because if you just if you restrict your bass line to something that only plays the root notes which is not uncommon at all you can place them [Music] that's only the root note and now you can suddenly move it around any way you want [Music] or whatever and it won't go outside whatever scale you are in you're playing right so that works well and to help with that there are two things you can do to get to that if that's what you want is either you can load a patch we have several patches that i only play the root note could maybe your maybe you could try this it's one called root note only because that illustrates another that is a very illustrative name yes it is so okay so it only plays a single note but it has a rhythm of some kind of rhythm the thing is as you can see the manual pitch light is on down to the right right i don't see it now because it kind of disappeared from screen you haven't zoomed in on it right oh i'm sorry wait oh this one now that that's what you're talking about right that's right that's on and that that means pitch stays as it is in the sequence that it's manual you it won't be effective what by whatever you do up there in the with the settings the pitch is going to stay flat at all times right it's gonna say whatever you put it to right yeah yeah in this case flat but you can still move that try try moving the diamond shapes around that selecting different objects and off bits so the rhythm will change so you can still use it to to find whatever you like in in terms of rhythm but you will ensure that you're still you're playing the root note only and this is of course this is of course good if you have a keyboard in front of you like i happen to have right now so let's say we have this pattern uh you have you can see here midi to pitch and meditative velocity means that you're controlling whatever the root note of this thing is by placing your keyboard so that's a way to just restrict it to whatever right so it's it's just doing root notes here right and so you're controlling what that root is root note is on your keyboard you're playing the melodic contour you can see it's playing the rhythmic contour yeah you can see this root note uh section here where it's c2 as to start and then i have uh pitch midi pitch here and triggered by sequencer you can have it triggered only by key too so only by holding down the key do you play it which is really nice if you want to do you know just play with nothing in particular you know start an endpoint isn't that important it just starts when you start playing so you can see that a live transposition going on there yeah and also live drink but this is another way to do 50 patterns because you did find where they start scroll back up there's a question gustavo asked a question i think we've talked about but he says is it possible to offset the anchor meaning the whole set of dots the nth step in any direction so we've talked about that gustavo a few there's a few there's a lot of different ways to skin that cat no offense to your cat there uh matthias um but um he's all skin you don't you don't have to skin him he's all skin don't worry um but um the the other there's a lot of solutions and if you back up about probably 20 minutes we cover a couple of them there's a way to do it with node echo there's a way to do it with pattern mutator there's a way obviously to do it in the sequencer if you actually just write the pattern into the sequencer and offset it and now there's a way you could do it using this trigger method as well manually just by triggering that i'll show it by just doing a pre-con so you can hear me starting late right [Music] so it's a way to just kind of right start it whenever you want start whenever you want to right i saw an interesting uh interesting comment in the in the chat from a joe i love playing with these toys but when i'm doing actual music production i usually fall back on just playing the music in myself i think that's kind of what we're trying to help with with players it's a lot of when you fall back i think this is really interesting when you fall back you tend to do something similarly because you have a set of skills and you have some knowledge like it's like whenever i do demos with ryan i play everything in c minor because that's the first key i learned that sounded good c major was so i learned c minor and kind of stayed there when i was a kid right and you tend to end up there right with your regular thing oh i had a side chain like this and i take this part of why we do players is not to replace you but rather to give you a different entry point right hey i wouldn't have thought of this rhythm or i wouldn't have maybe you know the thought of these pitches i'll play my own rhythm but it got me some inspiration maybe you even get a bass line build an entire song from it and remove the bass line and have another one right but it's a lot of getting to that idea and getting to the idea like in a different way i think right part of why why we like players so much is that sure you can make an entire song and just kind of let the players do the work but they bring you to some new ideas i think right really key you know in a so in a weird this is a sort of very philosophical producer sort of way as we have all moved in the box and into home production and sort of we have these amazing tools that are capable of letting us do everything and if you go back even 30 years you needed other people to do if you needed base on something you needed a bassist to do it if you needed drums you needed a drummer to play it and um what we lost in the shift to being able to do everything is that it's your own input your own artistic instincts that you're putting on the song and you're losing the outside influence of someone else kind of coming at it differently on this particular player it really does feel like i'm getting in a weird way ludwig i'm getting you to play and collaborate with me because you and and sean you know who contributed some bass lines as well i mean but i'm getting someone else's perspective on what a bass line can be and and it does it it's not it's not the same as true collaboration but there is a collaborative element of knocking me out of my own routines and i've really appreciated that when i've been just to back up joe like i took his comment as an example because i thought it was interesting but he totally agrees like that's that's what he thinks too right that it's it's fun to play with this because you can get stuck in your uh in your things so it's not like he's like no i don't like them just to be clear for right right gustavo says as another workflow method he says the baseline generator is a starting point for me then you send a track and tweak to whatever you need and that's a totally valid way to do it as well you know that you can and i think that's that's something i want to kind of show off too is that everything's a starting point in many ways so let's take this little track that i've been kind of abusing that's still pretty basic [Music] i want to use this for something completely different just to show that that can be done so i'll add in a baseline generator and and answer one of the questions in the chat who said why is there an id8 when i put in the baseline generator exactly good question um always connected to instruments because they send media data to an instrument and if you drag it in without an instrument so there's no instrument attached to then we create one and id8 is just a simple one with early on the the first the first time when players were first released we just didn't let you drag a player in unless there was already an instrument there and that was almost weirder people would want to start they'd want to start by dragging a player and they'd be like why is it not exactly working exactly so you get some sounds to start with and you can just the sweet thing about reason here is that you can actually take another instrument or another patch or whatever and just drop it on top of it exactly what i was replacing i'm gonna go and find some kind of this is a i'm going to find this cross-browsing thing it's actually a very very kind of overlooked feature i'll just try some some different plugs because why not this cross browsing thing where you have a device you can just drag in any patch whichever device might have made it [Music] and see whatever it is right it's you're not needing to think oh first i need to change to a combinator and then load the combinator yes exactly anyone who's followed our streams will know i'm partial to this patch so i'll use it but this is just uh to show you that you can use baseline generator for whatever reason anyone who's followed streams as well matthias will know that we've now entered plucktown which is a yes very popular destination but if you just try some different patterns here i'm not going to listen to the bass line quite yet but [Music] let's take the velocity and make sure that really affects this [Music] now all the high velocity notes the blue ones will kind of increase the fold amount here that's the area that airy sound is coming from the high velocity yeah exactly so without it just sine waves can be a little bit boring bomb toy says it's sign of the times again he's on to you matthias yep uh but this is just to showcase that kind of this might even work because the root note is c2 and there's a lot of minor-ness in the different things but let's see [Music] okay but what i wanted to show is just another way of stacking players here so i can use the scaling chord to restrict it to whatever i want so c minor but i can of course also remove some note side out of c minor if i wanted to and i'm going to use this to generate some chords too so i'll do some open chords here one thing you quickly learn is that less is more so i'm just going to do two notes [Music] good enough and i think you can keep on doing this for quite a while this is just showing you what happens with players so use one of the aforementioned note echos set up a little delay and maybe just repeat once and pitch that up maybe an octave see what happens [Music] that yeah exactly so we're pretty far from a baseline generator and my favorite thing about this is of course yeah that was a cool thing we came up with this is a big stack of course i can send this to track now and just be done with it and go i'll do stuff later i can also of course record it in pattern mutator because why not now i have this loop that where i can even remove all of these players [Music] that's a pretty good rhythm [Music] yeah there go good i was gonna tell you to filter it good [Music] michael wants to hear this going through an alligator can we indulge him sure but then i need to add some shuffle to the baseline too i'll just take the shuffle off the elevator both work okay [Music] yeah you kind of get my point i wanted to really show that the one of the fun things when you have all these players together is that like from a baseline you can end up somewhere else and vice versa if you start with you know scales and chords and then you go and okay i've restricted it but now i'll have that feed pattern mutator and then i'll let the bass line generator oh that becomes super weird maybe that's cool export you know that kind of building block mentality i think it's really fun and that's like you know to just to jump back to our previous conversation like that line is not something you would ever to go back to that idea of like okay when i really when it really counts i'm gonna play it myself it's like well you wouldn't have played that you wouldn't play something close to that i would never ever play this just the octave jumps is too fast and too much for my poor hands right [Music] right now if i like this i just save that to a pattern and maybe i mutate it again [Music] and then i start all over again the baseline generator and you know try something else what about these vibe things [Music] i'm just going to answer a question here um julian asks why not release base generator baseline generator it means as a vst plug-in so we can use it in any daw the the official answer to that is it is available in any daw reason runs as a plug-in in any daw the reason rack plug-in is a plug-in it's a u it's vst it's aax it runs in any daw um i think maybe what is behind his question is why not make it a dedicated singular vst and that's because we like re we like the sum total of reason what you've seen matthias do here of putting scales and chords and node echo and and alligator underneath europa and creating this whole sound that's that's what the creativity reason is all about it it's the sum total of all of its parts and so there's a lot of of that thinking i think like the rack it's just great for doing that kind of quick add-on experimentation kind of thing but it's important to note that it doesn't only work inside the rack as a player like you can send it as midi out to ableton live or right so you could right you could hook this baseline generator up to an arturia synth if you wanted to yeah right right exactly i've done it with hardware too which is really fun in the studio where yeah that's going to take a baseline generator to do a innovation base station when you when you do that i saw the ig story where you did that where was that um how are you getting out you're just going out midi out into midi in on the hardware or is it yeah it's basically just using a midi out device instead of another instrument and choose whichever output i only have a key step connected but right whichever media output is available uh sends you to the interface exactly that's actually one of the the cooler things with with players if you happen to be a big hardware user is they basically add sequencers to all your gear which is really really kind of fun because a lot of these old analog style since they didn't have a piano roll with you know hundreds of notes and infinite time that's right how you sequence synthesizers right so you get a very different result from just having this 16-step thing right 504 you know epic slap baseball yeah i saw that that is the question that is the question probably not i think i think you can try i would say no or maybe it turns into one of those crossroads things when it plays lots and lots of notes and the bass line generator just like plays the the essence of this i'm going to try whatever ever so can i can i do let's see i'm going to attempt special effect here can it slap there we go there's the old game all right that's my best quick attempt at uh doing a debut five before um well guys it is uh i do believe that it is uh night time over in sweden and coming up uh yes it is midday over here in california i think it is uh time for us to to maybe wrap up a little bit here um anybody i'm just gonna just we're gonna throw out some final thoughts here but i'm just gonna give it to the audience throw out your your last final questions if you got them or comments and we'll throw them up on the screen here but um oh here well here's one to to correct why is this not in reason 12 and just in reason plus it's not only in reason plus uh alan it's uh it's not standard in reason 12 it's an add-on available in our shop but it's not uh not only in reason plus so but of course if you are reason plus subscribed you you do get it it's part of it just comes with that's that's sort of the uh the promise of reason plus that you just get all the stuff and the latest stuff as it comes out but you can certainly if you have reason plus and you want to add this you can definitely do that so um let's see oh here's uh paul said that he was uh i was sending bass line generator signal out to my mini nova this afternoon so there you go i hope you liked what you were getting classic one i just before we came on just for the audience just before we came on matthias and ludwig were lamenting that they found out that uh the uh arp 2600 is back ordered now so your hardware dreams are going to have to or not back what do you call it not back ordered really it's like they can't make them fast enough chip but it's like it's part of the whole chip shortage right is that yeah yeah it's well it's part of the global just supply chain i i'm happy we're not doing hardware right now it feels like every single oh man i know it can hardly be shipped around the world and if it could you don't have the parts to build it anyway so here's a question just uh scale setting please final thought maybe this is worth saying so i we've talked about some features that are not on baseline generator i'm going to put you guys on the spot and sort of ask you are these things that may come in an update or not uh and i'll throw them out the big asks are a scale setting a pattern offset and i think there's another one too wasn't there maybe i'm forgetting a third one i have lots of others yeah exactly we thought about this quite a bit i'm sure you have i'm sure you have uh whether it comes or not whether we will do an update or not of depends less than 16 steps that was the other one that's the third one i mean anything's possible uh there's no like immediate yes we're going to do that next week and that's our christmas plans but all this feedback is of course super good and the really important thing i think when we're thinking about what we could add and not this do not kind of make the device uh too complex or compromised so like it does too much right i think i saw one request for example that i thought was interesting to comment on was that they wanted to be able to record into the sequencer baseline generator which which to me i think that's a that's a thing i could say for certain that won't be added right because the purpose of the device is kind of to generate some starting material for you and for you to then edit it right you would use it as just a baseline baseline retainer or baseline yeah we like we want our players and all our devices to have their own specific character and purpose and and so on it would be possible to create a device containing almost everything but but that's not you know that kind of robs the device from its personality plus of course it kind of robs us from the any future plans of making more devices because everything is already done if you know what i mean so and you'll see if you look at the the history of gear you'll often find that the things that become legendary and survive and good and the people love are not the things that try to have every feature you don't hear amazing tales of those early workstations that had all the sounds and could record an entire song right right no you you hear about the sh-101 though right tb303 which its initial reception was like what the hell do i do with this and then a couple of producers guitar pedals you don't you don't hear about the multi-effects pedals with every possible effect right the distortion delay reverb compressor yeah boss ds1 just you know the most basic distortion because they tend to to breed some kind of creativity uh people could think that having less features restricts creativity right that's i see a comment here why restrict creativity and it's actually it really is the opposite the the metaphor i always think about for whatever reason is uh holding your thumb on the garden hose where you when you sometimes when you restrict things and this is true for the way my creative brain works sometimes restrictions actually create you know these outlets of increased creativity rather than uh the other way around but that's certainly but it's not only about restrictions so we don't want to account we move stuff yeah we don't remove things on purpose i mean just to make things when you mention like a boss ds1 iconic very very simple guitar pedal but it has some kind of character or almost personality it's like and and since we i mean recent whole brand the whole idea reason is the rack with the devices where each device is kind of special our devices don't look exactly the same they have different kinds of looks and different i almost as if they were made you know had come from different whole parts of the world or whatever but so right and that kind of plays into this we want each thing to have its own flavor there's a reason why we almost never do you know uh and this is a straight copy of this thing right like like the company started was like that right with the three which quickly became like okay yeah exactly and anyone else could do the very same thing and many people did what's really hard to do is you know do something that feels like its own instrument right right right hopefully has its own legacy well in that in that regards hank says that this player really brings the platform to a whole new level of creativity so i think that's uh that's cool i'm glad it's working for you hank i agree with you another a question from rudy i missed the whole demo will this be uploaded to your channel yes it will rudy so worry not in fact as soon as i hit the end broadcast button you can well you can even jump back right now and start from the beginning but uh it's going to be archived absolutely on our channel um a couple of times people have been asking um in fact sometimes multiple times uh will this come to ios will it come to ios will this come to ios so uh for lens sake um you wanna answer three times uh no no no and probably not we have no no immediate plans for you more mobile development right um cool i'm just scanning here to see if there's anything else that uh we need to handle um oh breaking news evanes says his son who was born during this livestream will be named thor because i love reason um excellent i would say also quite a normal name he could be called scream four and that would be pretty strange right that's right scream for mimiko but i mean that's obviously like a supervillain so i would like to uh just float out there evidence that middle name is still open so ryan matthias or ludwig i mean i don't want you to have to play favorites but uh you know just saying i think maybe also also talk to your partner there before yes maybe also do that maybe first to do that what does new seed buff oh of course new seed oh that's a great question because i don't know the answer what does that do guys all right you saw the cv outputs on the back earlier in matthias demos and so you have it here in front the random cv output so you can get a random um like cv track going along with your baseline and pressing new seed on the front just generates a new one if you don't find that oh this particular random wasn't very good click new seed and then you get a new yeah okay i can show that super quickly i'll show you have attention the randomize button the randomize button yeah i'll show both exactly okay okay so you can see down here you you'll see that channel 3 and 4 on this little scope they will play a random cv curve you can kind of follow it along here if i click music it will change the shape of this curve pretty much repeating so there won't be one random value for each step but for each step there's a new note on it that's interesting even without anything else that baseline generator does that's interesting because sometimes i'll use the random waveform in like pulsar for example but it's always random it's forever random and so and there's times i wish that it were repeating so that's really a neat yeah yeah so that's what that does and something we didn't touch on at all it's the randomize button where it basically randomized the entire pattern generation [Music] pretty good actually yeah [Music] let's try a few more times a bit boring i'll tell you what matthias that that's a good one actually [Music] i like this this is such a matia song already i'm gonna here's what i'm gonna do jam out i'm gonna i'm gonna have you play us up so just jam out generate randoms or modify your patch do whatever you're gonna do i'm gonna pull you down just a little bit here and uh and i'm gonna i'm gonna just talk to everybody and say some quick goodbyes i'm gonna leave you up on screen for a little bit and i'm gonna pull you off in a second here but um guys hey listen thanks for joining us thanks for tuning in thanks for hanging out for sticking around if you joined us late don't worry this whole thing is being archived and you can watch it after the fact oh i'm hearing new things come in now i just want to listen to it but yeah if you want to watch this uh after the fact it's all going to be archived on our our stream here if you haven't checked out baseline generator yourself yet there's a free trial for there's both a free trial for um uh reason plus am i correct the same free traveler is a a cheap sign up for something you can try reason plus as a whole where you can try if you already got reason 12 or reason 11. you can try the normal shop trial of baseline generator as well so check it out see what it does for you and um you're getting i'm watching i'm i'm talking and i'm watching matthias he's throwing in synchronous he's really going to town here if you guys do use baseline generator send us uh send us stuff you're doing we're watching everything people are doing and we're enjoying it quite a bit and in fact we're actually going to be posting some stuff there's some examples i just saw one today of a guy who made a he took baseline generator made a really great sort of like french disco you know sort of daft punk like the source records they were sampling sound threw it into mimic juggled the slices then put a baseline on top of it with baseline generator as well and created just a really i mean you're going to we're going to post that on our channel you're going to see that soon it's a really well done bass line and well actually two bass lines you know this whole production that he does using two two versions of the bass line from baseline generator so listen we'll be back with more of these more streams i mean uh we're going to be doing some more in the new year as well for certain and we'll be back with just you know keep an eye on our channel we're dropping stuff all the time now from myself but from others as well from you guys out in the reason community we're starting to reach out to you guys and i'm sure you've seen some of the stuff from like archetype and and some of the other guys that we've been uh featuring on our channel i'm loving what we're doing i'm loving what we're seeing there so oh peggy peggy let me know one dollar reason plus trial thank you peggy that's what it is free to try if you free to try a reason as a baseline generator one dollar trial for reason plus if you want to get all the stuff if you haven't tried reason plus yet so there you go and uh i think that's it for now let's all go make some music i'm gonna make some bass lines myself that is actually on my agenda today for an upcoming project that i'm working on that you'll be seeing on our channel soon i can't wait to do it and that's it i hope you guys had fun thanks to matthias and to ludvi for hanging out with me and thank you guys for hanging out with me we'll see you soon [Music] now

Channel: Reason Studios

Views: 10,421

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Id: 1U5dVETnHcw

Length: 107min 43sec (6463 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021