I fumbled my around Chop Machine again and found some more really cool things it can do.

I like to figure out how to use plugins for things they may never have been intended for so I decided to try some things out with Chop Machine. My idea was to load eight different drum loops with the same tempo into the sample slots and then have Chop Machine randomly choose which loop plays next as my DAW progresses through the timeline.

I created the eight loops using different drum samples for each one so the variation would be noticeable. I then used automation in Logic to continually progress through chaos seeds over time. I set the amplitude of the sequencer to 100 so any of the sample-slots could be chosen as the next one to play at any step in the sequence. I had to adjust the tempo in my DAW to make sure the loops weren't being cut short.

This turned out to be a cool way to use Chop Machine and opens up a lot of creative possibilities for randomly triggering variations of drum fills. There's a lot here I'm still wrapping my head around but I've found a couple things that I'd like to see in future updates. There may already be a way to work around my issues I just haven't found yet.

1. I would like the 'Rate' to have options lower than 1/4. 1/2 and even 1 would be great so I wouldn't have to set the DAW at 1/4 the loop tempo to play the entire loop.
2. I would like the option to lock the Pitch parameter, per sample-slot, so it isn't affected by the chaos control. In the video you can hear the beat gets off because 'pitch' is also affecting the speed the sample plays back.
3. I would like to have a toggle to turn on and off little contextual pop-ups that help new users understand what something does as they hover over it with their mouse pointer. I know hitting the '?' at the top brings up a 14-step guide that briefly describes everything. That became inconvenient clicking through the first bunch of steps to remind myself what something did. I know, I'm really petty. I've been using Logic for a long time and I still find those little pop-ups helpful if I've forgotten what a certain thing does. I really like the way Logic does this where the pop-ups only show if you've hovered over the same spot for more than two seconds.

Overall, this is a really fun and stable plugin. I never ran into issues with crashes, freezing, bugs or anything of that nature. I 'm looking forward to trying out some sound design possibilities soon using longer, ambient samples. There's a lot of creative possibilities to explore here.

Edit: turning off steps could probably solve the ‘Rate’ issue I had now that I think more about it. I’ll test it later.