thoughts on making evolve more awesome

[adamj]

A few things I'd love to see in a future version:

* Evolve for CV sequencing modules (discrete-sequencing-type stacks + evolve = even more generative possibilities)

* Additional evolve operations to help avoid too much chaos. Specifically I had two ideas:
-- set a pitch to unison
-- set a gate to off
The basic idea here is to reset a step to some baseline/absolute value rather than relative to the current value.

* Control which steps are affected by evolve. Another thread discussed applying evolve only to the selected notes. I think that's a reasonable approach.

Adam

[Valery_Kondakoff]

Let me bring up this old request. Yesterday I was playing with Evolve and noticed the lack of the 'reset to initial/default state' action. I'm pretty sure something this is important enough to be included in the list of available Evolve actions.
Maybe it is a good idea to add an additional option: 'Reset to initial/default state' on Stop/Pause' as well.

What do you think? I have found a workaround: http://five12.net/showthread.php?t=919 , but it seems rather difficult and not really intuitive.

Thank you!

[Uncle GroOve]

Ok let's bounce this post back to the top. I also want a way to be able to evolve "away" from an initial phrase and then back to the original.
My actual hack consists of:
1) "select all" on the mononote sequencer
2) assign a modulation sequencer to the Random Jump; if you use a stepped sequencers as the modulating agent you can specify the number of normal vs randomised bars.
This is however a workaround - I'm not really randomising the phrase, I'm just introducing random hops every now and then (the end result is almost the same, truth said).

I just wonder if this could be somehow hardcoded in N4 itself. Something like caching the initial note numbers, and then applying some kind of function which allows the notes to evolve away from the initial state to some extreme point and then return to normal.

Ciao

Paul

[Uncle GroOve]

Let's see if this works: I've attached a working stack done with the hack mentioned above.

P.

[jim]

Just a quick brainstorm here, but what if a new stack preset was made on each time there was a generate or evolve action?

Jim

[guyd2]

Originally Posted by jim

Just a quick brainstorm here, but what if a new stack preset was made on each time there was a generate or evolve action?

Jim

Won't that generate an awful lot of stack presets ?
And they'd be only helpful if their name would somehow convey which action just was evolved, no ?
(unless all of the actions were utterly random and approached as such by the user, in which case the amount of presets & their names don't really matter much, I guess)

Just thinking out loud... : what about an additional devolve function, which -- at any user-defined point in time -- simply steps back in reverse through all of the previously triggered evolve actions ? A bit like stepping back through a typical Undo History in apps like Photoshop et all... (but only applied to the Evolve actions). And then having the possibility to somehow trigger that moment where it switches from Evolve to Devolve (and back).

In my ideal Evolve Actions world, the Evolve presets should be user-definable; perhaps with something like a macro recorder or similar.

_g

[Uncle GroOve]

Originally Posted by guyd2

Won't that generate an awful lot of stack presets ?
And they'd be only helpful if their name would somehow convey which action just was evolved, no ?
(unless all of the actions were utterly random and approached as such by the user, in which case the amount of presets & their names don't really matter much, I guess)

Just thinking out loud... : what about an additional devolve function, which -- at any user-defined point in time -- simply steps back in reverse through all of the previously triggered evolve actions ? A bit like stepping back through a typical Undo History in apps like Photoshop et all... (but only applied to the Evolve actions). And then having the possibility to somehow trigger that moment where it switches from Evolve to Devolve (and back).

In my ideal Evolve Actions world, the Evolve presets should be user-definable; perhaps with something like a macro recorder or similar.

_g

The problem is that Jim has to find a way to cache all those intermediate steps and to undo them. When I evolve a sequence I see that things change not in big abrupt steps, but it seems to me it ids progressive. So there's a big lot of data that needs to be cached and reversed, if you know what I mean.
But then again, Jim probably has some ultra-algorithm up his sleeve and it's no biggie at all

P.

[guyd2]

Originally Posted by Uncle GroOve

The problem is that Jim has to find a way to cache all those intermediate steps and to undo them. When I evolve a sequence I see that things change not in big abrupt steps, but it seems to me it ids progressive. So there's a big lot of data that needs to be cached and reversed, if you know what I mean.

Not speaking in Jim's name, of course (far from)... but I reckon those evolve steps do not represent "big data". Just a few bits or bytes for each step, me thinks. And those can always be written to, and retrieved from the hard disk.

Originally Posted by Uncle GroOve

But then again, Jim probably has some ultra-algorithm up his sleeve and it's no biggie at all
P.

Most likely, yes.

Thinking about this a bit more... (and excuse me if I'm ricocheting off wild tangents here, but it's bloody early on a Sunday morning)... wouldn't it be great if the Evolve function is treated like some sub-sequencer (a mini-sequencer module within its master-sequencer module), with some basic & typical sequencer functionality built in ? Like in: having CV-able and/or triggerable access to all and any of its steps, etc ? That would allow for some awesome stuff like e.g. swinging back and forth through the Evolve steps with a LFO... or sequencing with a gate sequencer through its steps... or having the possibility to synchronize Evolve steps with other modules.. etcetera. No ?

_g

[jim]

Originally Posted by guyd2

Won't that generate an awful lot of stack presets ?

It certainly might...

Originally Posted by guyd2

And they'd be only helpful if their name would somehow convey which action just was evolved, no ?
(unless all of the actions were utterly random and approached as such by the user, in which case the amount of presets & their names don't really matter much, I guess)

As far as stack names, there's aways a way -- even if it's just something like 'evolved@<timestamp>"

Originally Posted by guyd2

Just thinking out loud... : what about an additional devolve function, which -- at any user-defined point in time -- simply steps back in reverse through all of the previously triggered evolve actions ? A bit like stepping back through a typical Undo History in apps like Photoshop et all... (but only applied to the Evolve actions). And then having the possibility to somehow trigger that moment where it switches from Evolve to Devolve (and back).

I like that idea -- esp. considering your first comment, along with the observation that generate currently only operates on a single sequencer module.

… but then, I did consider adding evolve to the sample kit too...

Originally Posted by guyd2

In my ideal Evolve Actions world, the Evolve presets should be user-definable; perhaps with something like a macro recorder or similar.

That is part of the idea of making them editable, and I have a list of more evolve actions to add, as well as generators...

Originally Posted by Uncle GroOve

The problem is that Jim has to find a way to cache all those intermediate steps and to undo them. When I evolve a sequence I see that things change not in big abrupt steps, but it seems to me it ids progressive. So there's a big lot of data that needs to be cached and reversed, if you know what I mean.

Potentially yes. A generate action corresponds to a whole module preset, but evolve actions are just a few (1 - 15 or so) param changes.

Oddly enough, this discussion has me reviewing some ideas on how to implement mixer scenes -- since a mixer scene is just a set
of param changes...

Originally Posted by Uncle GroOve

But then again, Jim probably has some ultra-algorithm up his sleeve and it's no biggie at all

Well, desktop computers are pretty fast these days -- even when reading things from disk...

Originally Posted by guyd2

Thinking about this a bit more... (and excuse me if I'm ricocheting off wild tangents here, but it's bloody early on a Sunday morning)... wouldn't it be great if the Evolve function is treated like some sub-sequencer (a mini-sequencer module within its master-sequencer module), with some basic & typical sequencer functionality built in ? Like in: having CV-able and/or triggerable access to all and any of its steps, etc ? That would allow for some awesome stuff like e.g. swinging back and forth through the Evolve steps with a LFO... or sequencing with a gate sequencer through its steps... or having the possibility to synchronize Evolve steps with other modules.. etcetera. No ?

That reminds me a bit about thoughts I had when playing with the undo history -- it is quite fun to make some edits on a sequence, then manually jump
around within the undo history to modulate the pattern.

Here's a another idea to put on the board: Each module with generate/evolve has it's own 'undo/redo' stack, with a history stack that can be indexed and
possibly triggered via other processes (i.e. param mod) -- there would be a definite rate limit -- at least a beat if not a bar, but you could then build a system
that would generate out a whole set of patterns, then auto-arrange itself. I'm not sure about that yet -- that's starting to pack a lot off weird into a small space…

Cheers,
Jim

[m5tevens]

I would be happy with:

1) Evolve Auto set per-preset instead of global for all presets.

2) The ability to set presets so that changes are committed on request instead of automatically, and to return to the stored version via a trigger.

3) The ability to select which controls are acted on by Generate.

4) Generate / Evolve for the CV sequencers.