this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
11 points (92.3% liked)
Dawless
22 readers
3 users here now
Discussions about running live music setups without the use of a Digital Audio Workstation. Dawless does not mean computerless.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yep. Phrase (a bar say) has 16 steps by default and you chain them up in chains. There can be an arbitrary amount of chains up to 16 in each block you see on the song view in my photo. So you could have a block with 3 chains in and one with 5 that resolves every 15 bars for example
Although there are 16 steps you can use 'commands' on any step to do all sorts of stuff. This is where the real power of trackers is. Those commands can be stuff like affecting fx sends, reversing samples, arps, there are dozens. There's also one called HOP which you can use to jump to an arbitrary position in the phrase. So if you wanted, say a bar with only 10 steps, you could put a command on 10 to HOP to 0. The tracker doesn't care about resolving anything it literally just follows things stepwise.
You can also edit the 'duration' of each step. By default its synced to the midi clock which use 6 ticks per step. You have a groove table where you can change that. That becomes ludicrously complicated and powerful. You can do simple stuff like swing, or mad stuff like compound times.
Yeah. Bit of a curve but it really quickly becomes muscle memory and it's just like playing a gameboy. In fact, the interface is based on the gameboy layout, it being the spiritual successor to lsdj