Groove Rider 2 | Session 37: drone patch, stock synth, single part, three voice layers

⚡️WARNING⚡️ This video may involve or include experimental sound design, connecting powerful sound processing modules together in almost endless ways, sometimes creating extremely loud feedback loops, howling oscillations or badly distorted signals, suddenly and without warning. Please be cautious and use moderate volume levels with your speakers or headphones. Hearing loss and hearing conditions like Tinnitus are permanent and irreversible. Nobody wants that, nobody needs that. Remember, the health and safety of your sound equipment, including your hearing, is your responsibility. ✅ --- In this video I patch a Groove Rider 2 drone on the iPad with three stock (built-in) subtractive synth layers on one part. I spend more time in the envelope and LFO views than the previous video to try to demonstrate some of GR2's built-in functionality as a musical instrument. In order to remove the audible clip click sound that can be heard when the part's midi clip loops, I extended the polyphony to 16 voices in the synth settings and extended the duration of the attack and release in the envelope generator to their maximum of 20 seconds. I ended up running the drone with an eight bar midi clip and it sounded fine as the long release tail and 16 voice polyphony swallowed the clip click sound as the clip reset itself every 8 bars or 16 seconds at 120 bpm (At 120 bpm the eight bar clip length is 120 beat/1 minute = 120 beat/60 sec = 2 beat/sec. The time signature of the pattern is 4/4 so 4 beats in 1 bar. In terms of time, 8 bars is 8 bars x 4 beats/bar / 2 beat/sec = 16 sec. If you are running at 120 bpm, a shortcut to determine the duration of a clip in seconds is just multiply the clip bar length by 2. For example, 8 bars x 2 = 16 seconds.) Because the midi clip is only 8 bars or 16 seconds long, the clip resets at 16/20 = 80% of the attack stage of the envelope. So we are not taking full advantage of the envelope to shape the sound. I think it would be better to extend the clip length to a minimum of 20 bars or 40 seconds and edit the midi data in the clip to 10 bars only to fully engage the envelope (10 bars or 20 seconds for the attack phase and 10 bars or 20 seconds for the release phase of the envelope. Additional bars if added would be automatically assigned to the sustain phase). In addition, because we are using three voices (layers) in this patch, we could adjust the LFO for each layer where it resets in it's cycle, so each layer LFO cycle is slightly different. To add more variation we could patch three voices using three separate parts, one part for each voice, instead of having all three voices layered in one part. We can adjust the clip length of each part so each clip or voice is resetting at a different time. The musical term for overlaying repeating patterns or loops of different lengths is polymeter. For example, the three voices share the same underlying tempo but might loop at 20 bars, 22 bars and 24 bars with midi note lengths of 10 bars, 12 bars and 14 bars respectively which would add a sustain duration in the envelope. Because the loop lengths do not match, the starting points of each loop will drift apart and only line up again after a longer cycle (using the least common multiple). By the way, the maximum number of bars of MIDI data that can be contained in a single MIDI clip in Groove Rider 2 is 128 bars. While pattern length in pattern settings is restricted to 16 bars, that value is only used for clip sync. The underlying midi container engine allows you to change the clip's loop length via the edit menu, print external MIDI data, or import full .mid files stretching up to 128 bars inside a single clip. Having said all this, I think I will try building a 3 part drone patch with: a) clip and midi bar lengths of 20/10, 22/12, 24/14 to fully engage the ADSR envelope; b) polymeter; c) different synth engines; d) harmonic tuning of each voice; e) different LFO wave shapes for each voice, and; f) different LFO cycle reset points, in the next video ... Session 38. Stay tuned. 🙂