Reaktor/Projects/BeatMashery

Beat Mashery

This page is for gathering the information from this thread on the Reaktor Forums and for documenting the planning and implementation of beat mashing / editing tools.

Ideas and Inspiration

The GURU drum machine has some nice editing features, such as click / drag to create a row of hits with up / down dragging changing the timing of the hits (8ths , 16ths etc..) then if the SHIFT key is held down, up / down dragging can create velocity fades.

Instruments

Dave Pape suggested working on 3 components that each handle a major part of the process

1. Break Slicer
2. Chop-player (Sequencer)
3. Sample-player

Break Slicer

Automatic slicer using threshold with user control for slice points.

Creates map across keyboard for use in the sample player

• Single Hits
• Processed single hits : Need to define a set of processes, tag which hits are interesting
• Break Sections

For the processed hits section maybe look at how to generate them as .wav / .aiff files as well.

Sequencer

Something like an event table containing blocks of MIDI data: rolls, filter sweeps etc

• Automatic layout of all hits from the sample map
• Each row can have a different quantize setting which is easy to adjust while editing
• Keyboard modifiers for preset and custom row patterns

Row Patterns

Have a set of predefined patterns and custom patterns. Hold down key (or select from list) to activate pattern, mouse click inserts selected pattern at cursor position.

Maybe have option for 'wrap pattern' so that patterns that go off the right edge wrap back to the start.

Controller Data

Preset lanes for controllers like cutoff, pitch shift. Ideally allow adding custom lanes to control anything, see the EVENT BUS from the user lib.

Sample Player

Sample-based instrument containing a sample map made from the output of the Break Slicer. Plays MIDI from the sequencer.