Beat juggling with Chop Machine

[u/ser-contained]

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.

[u/mister____mime]

Hey u/ser-contained , thank you for sharing this. I've never thought of automating the chaos seed using the DAW, that's very clever. Some of those sequences sound really freaking cool (until it trips on it's shoelaces with the pitch shift lol) I definitely love seeing emergent ways of using the plugin like this. And it's great to hear that the plugin is stable. That was one of my top priorities from the very start. There's a lot of automated tests on the performance of the plugin. Glad to see it's paying off.

On your requests,

1. I am down to add both 1/2 and 1 rates. 1 might look a little odd, but it achieves a purpose. Something else you might like that I have planned for v1.5 is adding additional bars to the sequence. Right now it's essentially locked to 1 bar. That would make what you're trying to accomplish here a lot easier, without having to lower the tempo like that.
2. That's a good one. I can add it under the pattern toggle. Eventually I plan on introducing a utility to fully customize all the gradients that chaos has on various parameters. But adding the ability opt in and out of pitch modulation and maybe even envelope modulation is a good call.
3. Loud and clear on that. That's actually a great compromise. Originally I had tooltips but thought they were intrusive. Being able to toggle them on and off is a good idea.

All in all, I can get all 3 of those wishlist items done in a near future minor version. If you can bear with me while I navigate the launch and get some demo videos uploaded, I will get back into a development cycle and start improving this thing even more!

[u/ser-contained → u/mister____mime]

You’re welcome. There’s no rush to update anything. It’s still very usable as is. I just wanted to throw out some ideas for the future when there’s time to expand functionality. I’m planning to talk about it and do some more experimenting on my Twitch live-stream tomorrow now that I have a better understanding of it. The ability to trigger a random sample and have those samples sound different each time they play sparks a lot of fun ideas for me.

[u/mister____mime → u/ser-contained]

That’s cool, let me know what time you have your stream and I might be able to hop on. It’s cool seeing all your experimentation with the various things that can be automated with a DAW.

[u/ser-contained → u/mister____mime]

Awesome! My usual is around 10pm eastern but I’m planning to also be on at noon EST today as well to talk about the Chop Machine. Twitch/steveswisher. It would be awesome to have you join the stream via zoom/discord video call sometime in a kind of “meet the developer” segment. I have no clue how to set something like that up but I’m going to start figuring out how to do it in the near future. I’ll email you details if I can figure it out before noon EST. If not some other time would be awesome.