timing free recording

[laurentius]

Hi there,

this is my first post here and it's a rather difficult question, so I give it a try:

I am aiming at doing something with the Keystep Pro that might be called "phrase sampling" or midi looping. Instead of realtime record a phrase or a melody into a predefined length of such and such amount of bars or steps I would love to hold record, perform, and when I finish the recording it immediately repeats the phrase. If it's shorter than let's say the "master track length" it's shorter and repeats for instance after 15 instead of 16 steps. If the next recording (after deleting the phrase) is longer than before no problem again. You get the idea? I know this might sound weird, but I find no hardware sequencer that is capable of doing this, only certain audio loopers can achieve this...
Looking forward to hearing your ideas.
L.

[AdrianLazerMan]

Hi,

so I'm not the only one with that idea lol.
I couldn't find anything that would work like that, though I have the plan to build something like that on my own with an arduino or raspberry PI.
Will post here again after I got something to show, this post pushes me really to do it because now the time invested would not only be for myself alone.
I also had the idea of an auto arm feature, so as soon as you start playing it would record, and you just set a threshold of how many empty notes there are allowed, so when you stop playing it would detect that as well though I'm not so sure if that would feel good...

[laurentius]

Cool! But also pretty weird how these things are not possible on such a complex device. It's nothing but ridiculous how obsessed people are with quantized grid oriented music ONLY. I think the Bastl Midi Looper can do this as well as the Eurorack module Hermod. Probably I will buy one of those...

[marcel-x]

Interesting concept!
Though I wonder how the sequencer can automatically determine it’s your last note of that pattern and not a long rest.
I guess, you have to press a last step button of some sort.

[AdrianLazerMan]

How about a Rest/End button, so you could toggle if you have to enter a rest or to enter end of sequence?
Also, and I think that would be an even nicer feature, I was thinking about implementing a "rewind" feature:
Imagine you're playing live and create a melody you want to loop, the device would just record everything like a tape loop, then you could go back to the stuff you want and write that into the sequencer.