ZOA — Living MIDI Sequencer by Ryan Robinson - Released

dakti

is ZOA works as AUv3 also with Cubasis and / or Garageband to be able to create track with random notes? Thanks.

Gavinski

Yes, definitely needs a velocity range per playhead instead of fixed velocity. As a workaround I have been using separate instances and routing them through midi curve from the Midi Tools app, using Curve to set randomisation ranges. Very useful little tool and the only one I use regularly from that suite

Sergiu

how many playing heads zoa has? trying to compare it with the all mighty fugue machine

sigma79

Cool sequencer.

bresk

This is the first app I get since a few months now.

Edward_Alexander

@palms said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

@palms said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

@palms said:
I enjoyed the beta. I hope that an external midi trigger option gets added at some point.

Lots of fun generative auv3 apps out there now, but imo things are more fun when they can speak to one another in a modular fashion. sending a generated rhythmic sequence would make it more flexible and fun.

We have some discussion on groove templates in the Mozaic thread yesterday. I still think Photon AU will do it, but haven't tried yet.

I'm not sure what you mean tbh. As it stands, ZOA's rhythmic generator is only internal, no?

What I'm suggesting is opening it up so that it can receive gates from the outside world. Piano rolls, Euclidean seqs etc.

We were talking about going in the opposite direction for the same effect: MIDI out from the sequencer into an app -- say Mozaic or Photon AU -- that applies a rhythmic template to the MIDI stream.

ah, I see. Imo the rhythmic aspect of ZOA is its weakness. It spits out very typical generative sounding music to me.

I'll grab it once I can make my own scales and it can receive incoming midi gates to trigger. It's just too limited at the moment.

I saw the chromatic scale setting in there. Cant you build your own custom scales with that? I’m not seeing the limitation.

sigma79

Pierre118

@Sergiu said:
how many playing heads zoa has? trying to compare it with the all mighty fugue machine

All information is in the first post.

ervin

Since Zoa's internal synth is not available in the AU version (unless I'm mistaken which has happened before), I'm trying to find the most similar sounding preset in another AU synth so I can emulate the standalone Zoa sound in AUM.

Synth Knowers, which preset of which AU synth brings me the closest?

Thanks much for the tips in advance.

Ps. I'm sure "you can do it in Drambo", but I'm hoping for another option.

Carnbot

@ervin said:
Since Zoa's internal synth is not available in the AU version (unless I'm mistaken which has happened before), I'm trying to find the most similar sounding preset in another AU synth so I can emulate the standalone Zoa sound in AUM.

Synth Knowers, which preset of which AU synth brings me the closest?

Thanks much for the tips in advance.

Ps. I'm sure "you can do it in Drambo", but I'm hoping for another option.

The init patch in Ripplemaker is pretty close

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

It tends to get stuck and replay the same thing over and over no matter what I paint in.

uncledave

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
It tends to get stuck and replay the same thing over and over no matter what I paint in.

If you enable Auto Respawn under Life, it should randomly regenerate once down to a single pattern, but sometimes it gets stuck oscillating between two patterns, and that isn't detected automatically. I've noticed that, since the playheads roam the pattern sort of randomly, you can set the Auto Advance Pace to 2 bars or 4 bars and still have a pleasing sequence. This can slow the progress to inevitable death.

auxmux

@uncledave said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
It tends to get stuck and replay the same thing over and over no matter what I paint in.

If you enable Auto Respawn under Life, it should randomly regenerate once down to a single pattern, but sometimes it gets stuck oscillating between two patterns, and that isn't detected automatically. I've noticed that, since the playheads roam the pattern sort of randomly, you can set the Auto Advance Pace to 2 bars or 4 bars and still have a pleasing sequence. This can slow the progress to inevitable death.

Is that intentional or a bug?

hightunnels

Great sequencer! Has anyone been able to successfully use it as an AU in Logic? I can get it to open as a midi fx but can't enter anything into the cells. Works great as standalone on mac os sending midi over to Logic or Ableton via the IAC driver but would love to have multiple AU instances.

ervin

@Carnbot said:

The init patch in Ripplemaker is pretty close

Thank you 👍

dakti

@dakti said:
is ZOA works as AUv3 also with Cubasis and / or Garageband to be able to create track with random notes? Thanks.

You made me to buy ZOA and check the issue myself Garageband doesn't see ZOA, but Cubasis 3 does - and it works pretty cool

WTK

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
It tends to get stuck and replay the same thing over and over no matter what I paint in.

If you are in for some experiments search for some game of life patterns on google. The glider would be a good start. It's a spaceship. There are other interesting patterns as well. Maybe read some stuff first which kind of of patterns yield some evolving results. Disable the reset option for them but keep the auto thingy on.

tahiche

@Agatha_aga said:

@NimboStratus said:
Do you find it sometimes reduces to a small set of notes and repeats endlessly?

Yes, I think it somehow related to the GoL oscillator concept

Interesting. I had no idea but it seems like there’s some sort of logic behind the mutations. I thought it was purely random, very cool.

celtic_elk

@tahiche said:
Interesting. I had no idea but it seems like there’s some sort of logic behind the mutations. I thought it was purely random, very cool.

Yup, rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

Krupa

I wonder if different rule sets might be possible? I think there’s more stable or less stable ones, could be interesting… I was just thinking as well, maybe different layers could be different kinds of outputs; I’ve got notes, one for velocity, another for a CC - would make really interesting offset patterns…

Gavinski

Remember that Xynthesizr also incorporates some rule of life stuff. Pretty cool

tahiche

ZOA is pretty great. Good fun!.
At first I was lost in all the (nice) randomness. After watching the videos posted on this thread I decided to try and get a hold on the “arp” mode first, that is, turning off the auto regeneration stuff. There’s plenty of options with the different play heads to generate Inter winding melodies. Here’s a little test running a set of (inmutable) notes to 4 different synths on the play heads, changing the play mode, patterns, etc… and some “root note changes”. ZOA is very rewarding and creative, playful.

0tolerance4silence

I’ve been using it mostly with auto-generative settings off. It can do quite a lot. One downside though (reported earlier to dev, hopefully will be addressed sometime), when you do manual note picking for playback and save the project, only settings will be recovered on project load, not the notes (middle section), so be mindful of that - capture your idea or take a screenshot of selected notes

Edit:
also, more reports about the issue for this type of use probably would be beneficial to get a speedy resolution

Krupa

@Krupa said:
I wonder if different rule sets might be possible? I think there’s more stable or less stable ones, could be interesting… I was just thinking as well, maybe different layers could be different kinds of outputs; I’ve got notes, one for velocity, another for a CC - would make really interesting offset patterns…

I’ve started thinking about a mosaic script to do this, weekend project ahoy!

Krupa

@Krupa said:

@Krupa said:
I wonder if different rule sets might be possible? I think there’s more stable or less stable ones, could be interesting… I was just thinking as well, maybe different layers could be different kinds of outputs; I’ve got notes, one for velocity, another for a CC - would make really interesting offset patterns…

I’ve started thinking about a mosaic script to do this, weekend project ahoy!

Very basic version below; route ZOA through this script in Mozaic, set the second layer to output on midi channel two while leaving layer one on midi channel one. It scales the note number outward from a range of 50-90 to 0-127 on velocity, seems to work I think, could do with some options, controls for the range, which channel does what etc, and then add a CC layer as well…

    @OnLoad
      Log {Welcome to Mozaic}
      ShowLayout 0

      varVel = 64
    @End

    @OnMidiInput

    if MIDIChannel = 0
      varNote = MIDIByte2 
    endif 

    if MIDIChannel = 1
      varVel = MIDIByte2  
      varVel = TranslateScale varVel, 50, 90, 0, 127 
    endif 

    if MIDIChannel = 0
      SendMIDIOut MIDIByte1, varNote, varVel
      Log varVel
    endif 


    @End 

Svetlovska

@rygrob: big fan of Zoa, already have three tracks with it under my belt.

So I hope you won’t mind if I make a suggestion which I think has already been made above (in which case, I am definitely seconding it.) ?

It would be very helpful to have probability sliders for each of the four channels, so you can dial up and down the actual activity of each. I am currently getting around the ‘always on’ aspect of Zoa by putting one of Art Kern’s brilliant MIDIGates in the signal path for each, and offloading the probability chores to those, but that is four more apps I have to load to thin the event stream coming from Zoa.

It’d be great if we could just dial in more or less activity, in more or less predictable ways, directly from within Zoa itself.

That’s my two penn’orth anyway. Still loving it though!

Edward_Alexander

Was just messing around this morning and suddenly realized that ZOA makes an amazingly capable drum sequencer!

All kinds of polyrhythm goodness!

@rygrob Thanks again for creating this amazing sequencer! I’d like to see more scales, as well as maybe adding some of the “Grid” settings (like the Range and Scale) over to the individual play heads.

bleep

@Svetlovska activity can be dialed down using the pattern feature with silent cells. Not quite as random, but with different length patterns it might work out for you.

A Clear button or gesture is needed, as well as saving initial On notes with a preset (bonus: library of some oscillator presets).

Maybe the playheads could get a time offset in addition to the pitch offset?

celtic_elk

I would appreciate some drop-down options for a few of the controls. Scrolling manually through root notes and scale types, for example, is not very efficient.

Svetlovska

@bleep : good suggestion, but I still think there’s something to be said for probability sliders you can drag up and down in real time, non destructively.