harmonic rhythms
Harmonic Rhythms is a max for live device for Ableton Live 12 Suite 12.2.7 and higher. It expands and combines the sequencing ideas that the subharmonicon and dfam has, and is controllable via Push 3 Standalone.
[Theoretically it should work for earlier versions of M4L and Ableton, but no guarantees.]
The main additions are:
- Rhythm offset moves a rhythm one denominator left or right, helping slightly desync things without changing the entire rhythm of something.
- The subharmonic secondary notes can also be set to be harmonics.
- Controlled randomization of most parameters.
Have fun making polyrhythms with interesting harmonic ideas :)
Notes:
-You have to turn on a rhythm in order for this to send any MIDI note data.
-Try adding a pitch scaler after it if you want to quantize the pitches! Initially I wanted to do that for randomization too, but I'd rather have the randomization be opinionated and built-in ...
-You can fully turn off a step by setting velocity to 0 for the step.
-Resync: is sometimes necessary if the rhythms get skewed (EG: offsetting the rhythm and then attempting to lay them back in line). When you press it, every rhythm resyncs to the first rhythm's clock whenever that first rhythm fires. You need to press it again to turn it off and let the rhythms go away to their own purposes.
Examples to understand what this is doing:
If your tempo is set to 1/4, and you set an offset -1 and rhythm of 2, the rhythm of that lane is:
(1 /(4-1))/ 2
is 1/3 /2 is 1/6.
If you would make a note fire off in less than 1/1, the rhythm lane simply will not fire.
When a step fires it will show in the lights above the note [when you're using it in the DAW], making it easy to see when a note's triggered. I'm not sure how to do that on Push 3 Standalone.
Push3 Standalone supported - all controls should be mapped.
Release notes:
1.0 - first release.
1.1 - miscillaneous fixes.
1.2 - combined subharmonic and harmonic knobs, some GUI changes.
1.3 - more GUI changes, internal change to use metro object instead of tempo
1.4 - the biggest update. added offset, sequencer lights.
1.5 - small push 3 fixes.
1.6 - added some randomization.
1.7 - big update: refactored note length to be quicker to change on standalone and finished randomization.
1.8 - tempo bug fix. (note: tempo will not be detected when changing it until the next note hits.)
1.8.1 - further tempo fix/small change: this now reads the time signature of live to set the initial tempo it adjusts.
1.8.3 - Fixed first sequencer third note light.
cycles edition:
Using this, I've been slightly annoyed at how it's ... harder than I would like to get fun polyrhythms. So I decided to rework this a little bit, and cycles edition is my first try on this change. I've put a picture next to it, but basically what it is is:
-one eight-step sequence, note/vel/len
-you can change the length of all of these sequences - note sequence, velocity sequence, and length sequence - individually
-there is a second sequence that runs on the same steps and lengths as the first one. you can only change length and subharmonic of this sequence: it uses the velocity and length of the first sequence.
-if you change the subharmonic, it only plays the lower notes. it does not play both notes at once.
I also reworked the rhythm section to make it more obvious, at least to me, giving you the ability to set 16/1 to 1/16 in each rhythm. (The eight on/off buttons - affecting the rhythm of both sequences individually - are still there.) What I did in testing was set all of the rhythms to parts of /16 - so, like, rhythm 1 is 15/16, 2 is 14/16, etc. - and then I'll play multiple of them in sequence 1, and the others in sequence 2.
This one is subject to change, but I think it's a better setup going forwards, so I'm going to see what else I can think of to make that feel as good as it can. And if you all have ideas, please feel free to make comments on the max for live page. :)