Pd-Grids

Greetings,

One of my objectives when I got my Organelle was to fight off the urge to get into the money-sucking blackhole of Euroracks. One module that I find very tempting and that is always threatening to make me fall down the rabbit hole is Mutable Instruments Grids: http://mutable-instruments.net/modules/grids

I’m quite intrigued with Grids’ approach to drum sequencing, but throwing together a small eurorack system with a three sample players, modulation, filters and grids would cost me more than $2500 (CAD). Luckily, Grids’ code is open source and furthermore, Henri David was good enough to port that code to a Max external.

I purchased my Organelle because I thought I could convert that Max external to Pd and after a couple weeks of head scratching I’ve managed to do just that.

You’ll find attached a complete Organelle patch that puts my new external to work.

There are seven parameters to tweak, spread over two pages (press aux button to switch pages):

**page 1**
* tempo
* Bass drum density
* Snare drum density
* Hi Hat density

**page 2**
* Map x
* Map y
* Chaos

Please refer to the Grids manual if you need more info on these parameters.

Note: One thing I hate about the same knobs controlling more than one parameter, is the sudden jumps between values when you switch page and the knob position no longer corresponds to the parameter value. My implementation deals with this by keeping the parameter value locked when you return to its page until the knob travel to a position corresponding to the parameter value. This allows me to smoothly change the parameter from its current value, without a sudden jump to whatever knob position is current after the page switch. If you want another behaviour, you can tweak as desired.

Note on sounds: Ultimately, I intend to use this sequencer with some drum samples, but I didn’t have any samples lying around that can be shared freely, so I used three drum voices created by Andy Farnell (aka obiwannabe on Pd forums). I’ll just take this opportunity not only thank him for those patches, but to also plug his excellent book once again: http://aspress.co.uk/ds/pdf/pd_intro.pdf

MIDI clock: Thanks to C&G metronome patch from one of the arp patches, the sequencer will sync to MIDI clock.

6 comments on “Pd-Grids
  • Alberto Romero on said:

    Thanks for sharing your work, I want to try this!

  • Blavatsky on said:

    This is a fantastic patch, I’m working on an adaptation that adds effects and random samples.

  • thetechnobear on said:

    really great patch – thanks

  • pwp on said:

    Superb!
    and thanks for the pointer Tristan.

  • Johannes Ekdahl Du Rietz on said:

    Great patch! I have a question: what are the three unused inputs on the “grids” external for?

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    • Platform:
    • Category: Sequencer Synthesizer
    • Revision: 0.0.1
    • License: GPL3.0
    • Modified: 8 years ago
    • Views: 1000
      Likes: 18
      Downloads: 1526
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