Hi! I hope this is the right forum to post this!

When I sequence stuff in PD, I rely on simple chance based systems way too often and I'd like to change that. So, what are your favorite ways to sequence things in PD? Maybe creative ways to sequence sequencers using other sequencers, maybe some fancy neural network, maybe something completely different?

I'd really like to hear about your ideas. I, and maybe also other people, would really appreciate your input on this.

Thanks in advance!

hi @Delta Sign i am not very experienced but basically you can use any if/then condition for sequencing. until now i tried markov, lissajous, the game of life, different other expressions and sinewaves for sequencing. It depends a lot on the right mapping. And for me it was helpful to scale the notes afterwards. I found this very interesting: http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies-from-one-line-of.html btw: your background patch sounds more like "music" than most of my algorhitmic attempts

@Jona Ohh yeah, bytebeat stuff is very interesting, it's kind of insane how far people took it since it first came up.

Regarding my patch sounding more musical than some more sophisticated approaches, that's basically what my problem is. I find it difficult to come up with creative sequencing solutions, that are not only fancy, but actually sound good and musical. I often find that the more complex something gets, the harder it becomes for the listener to actually follow what's going on, so I might as well just use random sources, if that makes any sense.

I like what Sean Booth himself once said in an Interview:

"It's like saying, 'I want this to go from this beat to that beat over this amount of time, with this curve, which is shaped according to this equation. Or you want all the sounds and the way the rhythm works to change, and you don't quite know how long the transform will take. You can then build a patch to do the transform, and you do it by ear with a fader. We may have one fader that determines how often a snare does a little roll or skip, and another thing that listens and says 'If that snare plays that roll three times, then I'll do this.' We don't use random operators because they're irritating to work with — every time you run the process it sounds different. How we play the system dictates how the system responds."

It sounds like they are working with manipulating actual sequences instead of letting the system generate the whole thing from scratch, which is definiely something I have to play with a bit more.

check out context.

@Delta-Sign Just something to bear in mind..... Random in Pd (and almost everywhere else) is not random in the sense that it will always be different. If you re-start Pd, then on the first run of your patch random will always be exactly the same.....
David.

@Johnny-Mauser Ohh nice! That definitely looks interesing! I'm going to check it ous asap! Thanks!

@whale-av Yeah, I know. I'm basically just using random objects as number stream generators, so it doesn't really matter. I guess one could use the system time or something as a seed to get different numbers each time.

It might be an idea to look at Modular Grid or M4L to see what kind of thing is out there.

Personally I like Hermut Lobby's BeatSurfer app. I made a version of his MonkeyFader in PD. It works well. I prefer to have more real time and immediate control over my sequences.

Many years ago there was this post: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/4681/pure-data-generative-music-radio-stream-up-and-running

Thee is still some source left: https://github.com/rumblesan/PatchWerk-Radio but aside from that the project seems abandoned.

I guess the submissions should hold several interesting approchaes to the subject, so maybe its worth trying to go through the posts. I remember it inspried me a lot. Most of them appear to be offline though...

Here is the latest version of my submission for the radio station: https://github.com/noreabu/pd/blob/master/minimalchine/minimalchine_v2.pd

It is kind of an regular sequencer with some randomness at given intervals.

PS: Be careful with the reverb!! Its a pretty raw abstraction and may become very loud.