Generating patterns

You do not draw a beat. You set hits, rotation and randomness, and the generator writes the notes. This is the machine's centre — everything else colours what happens here.

What it is

The driver writes real notes into Zynthian's own sequencer. Not a private buffer: because they are real notes in the real sequencer, patterns persist in snapshots and the touchscreen pattern editor mirrors exactly what the pads show.

There are two generators, and every channel runs one of them:

  • Euclidean, on the five drum channels. Given a step count and a hit count, hits spread as evenly as the grid allows, then rotate.
  • A Turing machine, on the three voices. Each owns a shift register, clocked once per pass and mutated with probability RANDOM; the register's value is read as pitch.

Which generator a channel runs is not fixed to its engine — see Sound and presets.

Try it

The drums.

  1. Press Play, then Group A to select KICK, then STEP.
  2. Turn encoder 1 (HITS) to 4. That is four-on-the-floor.
  3. Turn encoder 2 (ROTATE). The same four hits slide around the bar without changing how many there are.
  4. Turn HITS to 5. Five in sixteen is the clave. Try 3 in 8 for tresillo, or 7 in 16 for the busy one that still swings.

The voices.

  1. Press Group F for BASS, still in STEP.
  2. Turn encoder 3 (RANDOM) to about 30. The bassline starts fishing: every pass mutates one bit, so the line keeps turning into a neighbouring line.
  3. When a phrase goes past that you want, snap RANDOM back to 0. The cell reads LOCK and that line is frozen, bit for bit, until you move the knob again.
  4. Missed it? Press NOTE REPEAT. It gives the previous line back and sets RANDOM to 0 so it holds.
A KICKB SNARC CLAPD CHAT
HITS
0004
ROTATE
0000
DIVIDE
1/16
LENGTH
0016
The drum STEP page. HITS and ROTATE are the two you play with; DIVIDE and LENGTH set the frame.

How it works

The drum STEP page is HITS, ROTATE, DIVIDE, LENGTH, VELO, CHANCE, SWING. HITS and ROTATE are the two you play with; the rest set the frame. CHANCE is how often a hit actually fires — drop it and the pattern starts breathing rather than repeating.

The voice STEP page is LENGTH, DIVIDE, RANDOM, GATE, OCTAVE, RANGE, DENSITY, VELO. LENGTH here is the register's length in bits, not a bar count. GATE is how long each note holds — up to eight steps, so a pad can be a drone. DENSITY is how many steps sound at all: drop it and the line thins without changing its notes. The register's value is quantised to ROOT and SCALE from the ALL page, then placed by OCTAVE and RANGE.

RANDOM is the instrument's main gesture. Set it to 20–40 and the voice fishes. Snap it to 0 the moment you hear something worth keeping. The cell reads LOCK rather than a number, deliberately: a number could be a coincidence, while LOCK means nothing will rewrite that pattern at all.

Structure lands on the bar; timbre lands instantly. A change to what the pattern is waits for the channel's own next wrap, so the groove never jumps under your hand. DIVIDE and LENGTH show in angle brackets — >1/8< — while a change is waiting to take.

What it refuses, and why

Pattern length is quantised to whole beats, and always will be. The sequencer stores a pattern as a number of beats, so the reachable step counts are whole beats times the steps in a beat. 1, 5, 7, 11 and 13 steps cannot be asked for. Turning LENGTH lands on the nearest count that exists rather than refusing to move — so if the number skips past where you aimed, that is the grid and not a fault.

A silent channel says so. HITS at 0 is a silent channel, not a broken one, and CHANCE at 0 emits nothing at all. Both draw the channel's tab dashed — the instrument's one mechanism for explaining silence. Read the tab row before suspecting the rig.

See also

  • Modulation — how to make these values move on their own, and why the generator's own knobs refuse it
  • Playing and recording — playing over the generator, and taking a pattern from it
  • The surface — reading the tabs, and what to check when it goes quiet