LAB·77

what this is for

the kick on this site is an instrument: 159 knobs, 17 characters, dice that throw them, and guards that measure what came out before it is allowed anywhere near a set. everything else the deck plays is a list of presets wearing that coat, which is the thing ableton is already better at. so before building two more instruments, this asks the only question that decides whether they are worth building: throw every number in a percussion voice and a synth voice across its whole range, with no characters and no corridors, and see whether what comes back is worth playing.

FOCUS and TAME are the two knobs that are about the dice rather than about the sound, and they are two because unique and stable are not the same axis. four sources thrown against each other come out as a mush of all four almost every time, and a mush has no name: with the focus up one of them wins outright, the metal holds a pitch instead of scattering and a comb puts a note in the body, which is what makes a throw itself. tame picks nothing at all, it narrows every range towards its middle, so the corners stop being reachable and every throw lands somewhere a set could survive. measured over forty throws, the focus takes the loudest source from 0.49 to 0.78 of the sound and the tame takes the drive from a range of 15 down to 4.

nothing else here is chosen. the other knobs move the walls the dice throw inside, not the sound: DIRT widens what the drive, the folder and the two crushes may reach, LENGTH widens how long a hit may ring. the floor is the one number that is never thrown wide, because in this music the low belongs to the kick and never lets go of it, so a hit that reaches down there is a fight rather than a part.

IN A BAR is on by default, and it is the difference between a bench and a demo. a sound heard once is judged on what it is; a sound heard on a grid is judged on what it does, which is the question that decides whether it is worth keeping. with it on, every throw comes back as a bar at your tempo with the thrown sound on its own lane and the other one silent, so what you are hearing is that sound in time rather than a room full of other dice.

the four shapes are the first corridors on this page, and a corridor is what comes after a question is answered: everything else here is thrown across its whole range, a hat is the same space with walls around part of it. a closed hat is noise and metal over ten to thirty milliseconds, an open one over a hundred to four hundred, metal is the mode set left ringing with almost no noise under it, and a click is all attack and over before the ear has decided what it was. inside those walls it is still all dice, which is why two closed hats from this page are never the same hat.

the synth is thrown three ways, and the switch moves the melody rather than one note: on SHORT the lane speaks on most of the bar and every note is cut to the gap it has, on LONG it speaks two or three times and each note is left to ring across the room it was given. they are two different instruments, and a pile of throws with both in it says less than hearing each on its own. the dice are the same, only the walls move.

the key is the one thing here that is chosen rather than thrown, and that is the answer to whether a generator can be forced into one: it can, because a note is built from a root and a scale rather than picked off a keyboard. set them above and every synth note on this page lands in that key, however wild the rest of the throw is. the percussion ignores it, as percussion should.

a loop comes back as four separate buffers rather than one: the percussion, the synth, the room and the echo. nothing is printed into anything, so each can be played and taken away on its own, which is the only way to hear what an effect actually did. and a synth note is not a sample stretched to fit its gap: the gap is known before anything is made, so the note is generated at the length it has to fill and holds. that is the one thing a generator can do that a sampler cannot.

BARS is how long the form is, and past one bar it stops being a loop and starts being a shape. eight bars of dice are eight bars of dice, not eight bars of music: development is only heard against repetition, so the first bar is the motif and every bar after it is that same motif said again with one thing done to it. the fourth bar of every four is the one that moves, because that is where a hand expects it. nothing in there invents a second idea, which is exactly why the first one is still audible at bar eight: bars two and five are the motif untouched, three and seven are nudged, six is the same line lifted a third up the key, four and eight break it open.

the tempo is yours, not the dice's. every loop is built on the bpm in the box above, its buffer is exactly as long as its own grid says it is, and the wav arrives named with that tempo and its length in bars. drop it into a session at the same number and it sits where it was thrown, with nothing stretched: stretching is what this whole page exists to avoid. the grids are eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty four and thirty two steps, so a loop is half a bar, three quarters of one, one, one and a half or two. the twelve is in there on purpose: a loop that does not come back round with the bar is a rhythm no grid writes on its own.

LOOP asks the same question about rhythm. pat·77's generator has styles, gates and a density knob that means something, and it is the right machine to play a set from; this is the question underneath it. how many steps, how fast, how busy, where each hit sits inside its own step, how hard it is struck and whether it stutters are all thrown, and so are the two voices playing it. the whole loop is rendered into one buffer rather than scheduled, so it can be taken away as a wav and dropped next to a kick exactly as it was heard.

ALL FOUR on a loop's row is the four parts summed and levelled once, as one buffer: four stems each levelled to the ceiling and started together are four times the ceiling, which is the sound of a clip rather than of a mix. the parts under it are there to be soloed and taken away one at a time, and any number of them can be on at once, with the room turned down by how much is in it.

anything on the list can be played on top of anything else. the button on a row is a switch rather than a shot: press it and that throw joins what is already going, press it again and it leaves, and a layer that arrives late waits for the loop already running to come round before it starts, so at the same tempo they stay together for as long as they run. that is the question at the end of every throw, and it is the only one a single sound cannot answer: do these sit together. space stops everything.

every roll is measured the moment it is made: where its weight sits, how much of it is under 100 hz, and how long until it is forty decibels down. that is the claim being tested, not the noise itself. a machine that invents a sound and knows whether it is worth keeping is the one thing a sampler cannot be, and the numbers on each row are what "knows" means. take the wav and put it next to a kick: that is the only honest test of it.

every throw is judged before it plays. a seed is heard as up to 6 candidates, and the one handed back is the one with nothing wrong that the bench can measure: no tail cut off mid ring, no whine up top, no box in the low middle, no noise with nothing standing out of it, no hat that is dull or hurts. among the clean ones it keeps the one with the most character, front and body for its own kind. the row prints the score, what is still wrong if anything is, and how many candidates it took. the same seed picks the same one.