Summary of question: How to record CV values and play those values in a loop.
I’m watching a video on sequencers (a roland TR-8), but it’s about drum loops.
Specifically, this is for VCV rack as I’m a poor and don’t have the money nor inclination to start a proper hardware eurorack at the moment.
In my current patch I’m using my microkorg as a midi keyboard, there’s a module that converts midi into CV values, and I take the VCO from that to the FM input of a VCO (because the CV input is powered by an LFO chain).
I have two simple melodies (because when using polyphony the gate output is inconsistent. I need gate for the ADSR envelope)
1: A, B, C, G flat, G.
2: E, G, A, C.
Thing is, it’s more than just the notes, it’s the timing as well. I play the G flat and G at half the time of the other notes in melody one. I was thinking of say, using a MIDI editor with a piano roll where I tap notes and then save the midi file to play back but that sounds like a real complex way of doing what should be a very simple recording of voltage values and timings.
here’s an example using the Arturia beatstep pro. Twiddling knobs to find the note you want instead of playing on a keyboard is really unintuituve. I want to just record what I tap out on a keyboard!
People often use a quantiser in combination with a sequencer in modular systems. The quantiser puts all notes in a scale and makes it easier to ‘write’ a melody on the sequencer.
I’m not sure whether there exists a way to record CV-values in VCV-Rack. There do however exist ways of making a recording of audio inside VCV-Rack and possibly you could use a recorder like that to record (and replay) CV-changes. Have a look here.
That’s kind of what MIDI was designed for, though – most modern keyboards can output MIDI, and decoding and recording a 32 kbit/s digital bitstream is a lot easier than accurately sampling an analog CV signal with enough resolution that things don’t go out of sync or tune. There are CV-to-MIDI devices out there, but they’re not supercheap ($150 upwards judging from a quick googling), and they’re not really needed if your keyboard/controller can output MIDI anyway.
(that said, I don’t know VCV so missing a lot of context here; there may be entirely different ways to deal with this inside that environment, but odds are the best way to get your keyboard signals in there is via MIDI)
Nice, so I’m assuming there’s some sort of midi recorder that just says “play these notes, at these velocities, at these times?”
that’s pretty much what I want it to do, then I can have the midi fed back to the keyboard.
Most midi sequencers have the capability to do both step recording and live recording. Whats more, if you have a DAW, you can just sequence things in there and send midi out to control gear that way.
I used my old SR16 drum machine as a MIDI controller and keyboard. Good fun.
Recording patterns and tunes was easy and building patterns into songs or loops was tedious compared to a daw. But still satisfying.
that’s exactly what I want, something that when I tap the keys it records the notes and records the patterns. VCV rack comes with a sequencer but it’s something you have to twiddle knobs. Don’t get me wrong, I love knobs, but not for plinking out a melody, knobs and sliders are for playing with the tone and colour of sound after it’s been composed.
This is an old version from 3 years ago (strange to think that’s old now, but it is) but the sequencer he uses is the same as now.
This one explains about the quantiser which @Jos suggested. I didn’t understand what the purpose of it was but this video explains it fairly well.
He brushes over his setting the oscilator reference frequency of A=440hz, which makes C=523.25hz Frequencies of Musical Notes, A4 = 440 Hz
I’m one of those that likes A=432hz, which makes C=512hz Frequency to Musical Note Converter
Eh, not quite. But I like the idea of C being 512hz as there’s so many factors of 512hz, it makes calculating ratios easy and sometimes for music that’s important.
