We did a sort of reverse quantization to bring the clocks together in the intro to this… Reduction of random modulation of a group of clock pulses in MIDI using a Nord G2…
and the inevitable bird song, without which, no home built project is complete…
In retrospect the modulation, perhaps, should have gone on longer…
So you are the Mastermind behind the sequencer? yay! I just lost myself in…
it looks vaguely similar to Jeannie Sequencer, take a look at it:
Rolf is a genius! He’s now working on a new sampler with a new poly sequencer also.
Myabe you can get one or two inspirations from his work at sequencer.de!
I tried to read all this thread but it’s 4 years long!!! wowwowowow…
I will give you my two cents feedback…
I have created a 8x8 matrix sequencer, then loaded for each scene an audio sound, put into synced loop, and some stuff happened…
1 file of the first scene preset name got repeated to all columns below
2: I tried making the bars for one scene as long as possible because I wanted to try to load an entire song, but 64 bars weren’t enough. Tried play one shoot all loop but it didn’t work either.
Would be cool to have a play full sample, synced and not synced also. Like a double deck Mixxx Dj console basically, with a lot of samples scenes can can be launched synced.
3: selecting the scene num5 which is in the same columns of scene1, just 1 row below(still the same name) and loading another preset, it loaded another sampler instance in the main mixr page, but then when playin the first scene, it played both audio together… Also they share the same midi channel, idk if it matters or not, if its the normal behaviour or not.
I think to take one of the two samples off I have to delete the main sampler associated with it.
It’s a bit convoluted but it’s ok.
4: in Arranger the first two scenes got out of view, It starts from scene 3 up to 16, and idk how to move it back so I can see the top two scenes again.
5: I have no idea what the arranger “blocks” do still… I’m trying to learn the manual and experimenting a lot I think it has smthing to do with song mode but it’s also some sort of snapshots?? Cool that I can trigger scenes with midi channels polyfonically with an external seq
(Sq64, which I hate, but it’s the best I got 
Last but not least, yeah, would it be possible to make a simple Mixxx like scratch mixer where we could mix two tracks (mp3 or wav) and then add like mixxx some extra audio clips slots for extra Synth sounds, and audio fx??? In theory it just need to convert two clips into some round turntables looking things, add a couple of faders and leave like a bottom row of 4-8 clips under the decks, plus another one or two near the faders for the fx-s…
Mixx skins works very poorly on 600p screens… Cheers!!! Great work!!!
My also first patch for Zynthian is a seq patch! (I guess the Audio samples aren’t included)
Hi @bambalaya! I found it a bit challenging following all your points but will try to respond as best I can.
Jeannie synth has been mentioned in this forum several time in the past with a general appreciation for it. There is a dedicated post to it here. When I saw mention of it this week I took another look and smiled at how similar its sequencer looked to zynthian pattern editor. Uncanny! But there are only so many ways to do the same thing and we often borrow from others, leading to conversion on conventions. I think there was one or two ideas that I thought were neat in @rolfdegen’s sequencer that I might borrow in the future. All love to Jeannie and @rolfdegen for his wonderful, open source device.
I don’t know what hardware you are using so I don’t know how you are interacting with zynthian. Maybe you use a V3/V4 device with 4 encoders and small resistive touchscreen (which needs a stylus to be operated reliably) or you have a V5 with more buttons and larger capacative screen or you have a self build with some other combination of hardware control or you access via VNC. The three main (supported) workflows described in the user documentation are: V4, V5 & Touch. (Although this method of documenting only came in during the Oram release cycle so is only in the latest (incomplete) main user documentation.) ZynSeq has a dedicated user manual which is quite good. I certainly recommend reading it before posting issues or comments so that such comments can be informed and possibly include feedback on the manual itself.
I don’t understand what this means.
ZynSeq is pattern based. A single pattern is not designed to hold a whole song. You need to use the Arranger to add multiple patterns to build up a song. It is possible to add several patterns to a sequence in Arranger, and then launch that sequence from ZynPad. The arranger has many issues (as discussed in another recent post) so this may prove challenging, and we have plans to simplify this workflow.
I don’t understand this. By default, ZynPad has a grid with each column containing launchers for sequences in the same, mutually-exclusive group, i.e. if you press a pad, it will play after another in the same group ends. There are various modes for each sequence so that you can loop them, play to end, truncate at next sync-point (bar boundary), etc.
The arranger view is a window into the whole arrangement. It scrolls up/down and left/right as you move the cursor about, e.g. with arrow keys, encoders, mouse wheel, etc. It may be that you are using touch and that might present more of a challenge. I thought that two finger gestures could be used to drag-scroll and pinch zoom this view but reviewing the code, it looks like this did not make it to the Arranger view. That needs to be fixed.
This section of the ZynSeq user manual describes the arranger. Each block represents a pattern.
I wonder if this is similar to the work we are doing in our zynbleton development branch that has columns of sequence / clip launchers in the mixer view?
I changed my name so it includes my hardware, but it hasn’t updated from User profile.
It’d be useful if there was or in the user name or a signature, the complete hardware profile.
I overlooked this part when posting here sorry. It is a Pi5 diy with a slim midi hat ( with zero knobs atm - working on getting at least one working) Din Midi (on paper) and touch screen (with now a pen also!) plus a normal mac and an ethernet cable to connect the Diy Zynthian to the Lan. (all updates and capture wav uploads I did from the webconfig).
tnx for the other explanations, I’ll try my best to get used to them, have a nice day.
It’s a nice thought, but utterly unmaintainable at the human level, and rather too rigourous if done by machine.
Reporting from the webconf,however, is pretty seemless.
I updated some old images on the Zynseq wiki page today, some of the info blends between Oram and the previous version which probably adds to the confusion.
There’s a simple thing I can’t figure out with the arranger: once I add another pattern to the arranger (sequence 1 for example), how do I go back to the original pattern held at A1? Is it possible or does it become ‘locked’ until I remove the extra patterns/tracks? So below I need to remove track 2 and all the extra 1 & 5 patterns, then I can go back to edit pattern 1. Does that make sense? I just wonder if there’s an easier way to get around…
@riban Is there much attention going to the arranger in Vangelis? I’m going to get it running on my pi 4b for the first time today. I’m interested to see some of the other things people have been discussing here.
It would be great to see some adjustments to the label text on the sequences in the arranger mode to make things more clear. Maybe also a bounding box around an sequence zone once you’ve added more tracks to make it extra clear all of them are associated. The little numbers in the right of the label are easy to miss and they only show from track 2 and onwards. Another way could be to add a vertical bar across the tracks to indicate they are tied together.
Your first image shows 15 sequences, 1…15. (There are probably more scrolled off screen.) The first sequence has pattern 1 in bars 1 - 4. (There may be more scrolled off screen.) The second sequence has pattern 5 in bars 3 & 4. (Be aware that these are sequences. A sequence may have several tracks but your images show the default, one track per sequence.)
To remove a sequence, you highlight it and hit SELECT. This toggles the pattern at the current position. So, if you want to lose pattern 5 from sequence 2 bar 3, you would move the cursor (with arrow keys or encoders 3 (up/down) and 4 (left/right) then short press SELECT. If you want to add pattern 2 to bar 1 of sequence 1, you would move the cursor to that position, use encoder 2 to select pattern 1 (shown in the bottom left of the screen) and then short press SELECT. Please explain any shortcomings in the user documentation that describes this.
There is unlikely to be much attention paid to Arranger in the immediate future. (In fact, it looks much worse in the zynbleton dev branch I am currently working on 
.) This is because there is a lot of work being done on the next development cycle that means we don’t have the time to look at arranger. There may also be some changes to clip / sequence launching that influences the functionality we want from arranger so that is on hold until we see the results of that dev. An example of one of my mind-threads is that we may not want/need to see multiple sequences in the Arranger so it might only be a single sequence with multiple tracks. (There are various reasons why that might be a good and a bad idea.)
There are many bugs in Arranger and its functionality is incomplete. The purpose of it has also changed since its inception, hence it needs much work but unfortunately, that is not currently prioritised. It is not through any desire on my part to devalue or undermine it - quite the contrary. It is simply a matter of available effort and priorities.
What you said is fine, I can manage the addition and removal of the patterns. I may not have described the issue I’m having very well but after playing around I figured out how to do it.
If I’m in Zynpad view, and there’s a sequence sitting underneath A1(below), when I bold-press into that pad (as I would normally do to get to the pattern), it takes me directly to the arranger view. I thought I had to delete the collection of patterns+tracks from the sequence to get back to the original pattern made in A1. The way to get there is to bold-press a pattern inside the arranger view. So it’s accessed the same way, just one step deeper and it’s no longer available from Zynpad directly.
Anyway, I think the arranger is pretty interesting. It’s almost like a tracker with the ‘any pattern/track goes anywhere’ sort of flexibility. It also makes it a bit quirky to use. Combining the per pattern/note randomisation that’s available now with some repeating melody lines as a sequence could make for some nice generative type music that actually has a thread you can follow along with.
Before I understood how to get back to the pattern, I stumbled upon another way to use the arranger: dedicate one or more of the coloured groups for launching sequences by not putting an instrument chain on it. That way it can be kept free to be the ‘container’ for all the sequences. The rest of the pads in Zynpad are available to add and edit patterns. In this way arranger can be a hybrid pattern and sequence launcher in one.
For example, make a 5x5 grid, the blue group is empty with no chain (so all the blue pads have no label). When you add start adding patterns, the pad will take the name of the instrument chain assigned to track 1. So all the blue pads can contain custom sequences and all the other colours can operate as a simple pattern launcher (like ableton session view).
I’ll add some notes to the Zynseq wiki page, I’m making a diagram to explain the elements on screen too.
@LFO you have pretty much understood the original purpose of Arranger. It is a linear sequencer and it provides a mechanism for editing the sequences behind zynpad. Each zynpad pad triggers a sequence. By default each sequence has a single track with a single pattern. The logic in the GUI is that bold press on a pad takes you to the (only) pattern if it is in that default state or to the arranger if a more complex sequence has been programmed. Within Arranger, bold press on a pattern enters the pattern editor. Again, I think this is well described in the docs but do please help to explain if they are not clear.
One of the main changes I anticipate is the removal of editing sequences behind zynpad as this may be a flexibility that is little used and adds to the complexity and, as shown here, can confuse. Of course such a change may break the workflow you have just described which I had very intentionally programmed, forseeing users like you seeing their advantage but there is an argument that such flexibility is seldom required and hence may be excessive. Let the flame wars begin…
