 Hello, Oslo to sync here. In the past, when writing lyrics, one tool that I've made use of is a pair of scissors. Taking the scissors to a text, whether that's something you've written yourself or maybe a book or newspaper, and chopping it up into words or phrases, allows you to take that pre-existing body of work and recombine into something new. Maybe you change the order, maybe you throw parts away or recontextualise passages to play with a meaning or tone. This technique can be a fun way to spark new lyrical ideas. Recently though, as I've been exploring techniques of generative music, this idea of decomposition and reconstruction has become really interesting to me in a musical context, and it's something I've been playing with, both as a way to spark ideas and as a compositional means to an end. Today, I want to take a look at some ways to approach this idea using some of the really neat features on the Arturia Keystep Pro. Okay, let's start by recording in a sequence on track 1 to begin with, and this can be like our original text in this metaphor, if you like. I'm going to do this one in distant step mode, I think, and I'll just improvise something in. Something like that. That's the diggitone, by the way, with its own built-in effects. Lovely. Do it like FM. Anyway, so let's have a listen. Okay, let's start by slowing that right down, so if we hit shift, we can change the time division on sequence or go slow, like slow things at the moment. Okay, that's better. So let's start taking scissors to our sequence, if you like. So the first thing that we can do is take scissors to our sequence and discard parts of it now and again. So the way that we do that on the Keystep Pro is by assigning the randomness parameter to each of the steps. So the randomness parameter in the sequencer mode should probably be called sort of all probability. So as we start stepping through in step edit mode, so we can adjust each step in turn, I'm going to turn down the randomness, turn down the randomness, or I'll turn down the probability for each of the steps to sort of roughly, roughly 50%-ish. The nice thing about the way that the probability works on the Keystep Pro is that if you have a step with multiple notes on it, as many of these steps does, the randomness actually applies to each of the notes individually. So what you end up with sometimes will be parts of chords being played, or it might be just a single note. You might get everything, you might get nothing. So if we start playing this back now, starting to throw away entire steps I think maybe now we're going to slow it might change the time of vision up to eighth notes. So now we have a sequence where occasionally we have things sort of thrown away, but the general feel of the sequence will remain the same because everything is still happening in the order that it was originally played. So you have that progression that was already there. So let's talk about what we can do on the Keystep Pro to start doing this kind of shuffling approach, where in the lyric analogy we're moving words around, not just discarding them. So there are a couple of different ways we can do that on the Keystep Pro, and they have slightly different feels. So the first thing we can try is if we go to the shift menu here, and on the sequence pattern selections here, you might not be able to see on the camera, but you have three options here. You have forwards, which is what it's going on, it's playing in order. We have random with the notes we've played randomly, or the steps we've been playing randomly. So that's one way we can sort of shuffle everything up. The nice thing about this is that it's not destructive. So if we ever want to go back, we can just switch back to our original forwards mode there and get the same feel back. But the third option here I really like, which is called walk. And what walk is is kind of random within the order. So you'll see that generally speaking, the steps are progressing. That's showing up on the camera, it's very bright. The steps are progressing in order. But now and again, you sometimes get them skipping over a step. Sometimes it steps backwards. Sometimes it plays a step twice rather than once. So what you end up with here is a sequence that kind of still progresses in a similar sort of feel, but it's still kind of messed up and mixed up. So maybe this is like shuffling a couple of words here and there within our lyrics, but still basically having the flow of the narrative being the same. So the sequence pattern in terms of the ordering is a non-destructive process. We can always go back. What I think is quite exciting about the Keysight Pro, though, is that we have some destructive mutators for our sequences as well that can be really, really interesting, either to spring new ideas or actually just part of a performance. So there are a couple that I want to talk about. You access these by holding down shift and then you hit one of the step buttons here. So the first one that we'll talk about is on step 12, and it's written down here, it says Random Order. So this is going to do a destructive randomization of our patterns. So the notes that are on the steps are going to stay the same, but now the order that they're playing should come out of walk mode for a second so you can hear that it really is different now. So now we have a very different story being told by the harmony, and we can keep hitting shift and step 12 to keep randomizing. So that means as part of a performance, when you feel like a part is becoming stagnant, shift and 12 and you get something that is still going to be contextually right in terms of the music, in terms of the harmony, we're not straying away from notes that we know work here, but it's a different story being told, the narrative is different, which I think is quite cool. And of course we could be combining this with walk as well, so that even within these new sequences that we're generating here, we're still getting that movement that is not completely static. I really like with this walk mode that sometimes you get the same step twice. So the next one that I want to talk about that I think is particularly useful here is on step 14. This one is marked as random octave, so this is going to take the notes in our sequence and it's going to shift it into different octaves, essentially recontextualising what's going on here. We'll get different inversions of chords. Let's give that a go. And immediately that different inversion there of that chord there is really lovely. We've got that upper note that we didn't have that before. All the notes are still the same, but the octaves that we've been playing in could have been shifted around and it's different ideas, different versions. So there was a note there in the bass which isn't one of the root of the chord, so you had that interesting inversion. It's still working from a harmonic perspective, but now it's kind of different. And again, it's something we can just go during a performance and just hit it again and find a new layout. So let's introduce another track here because these things kind of get interesting when you start modifying them. With them overlapping. So let's set this one to eighth notes as well. Let's just record this live. Let's do it unquantised. It's a risky decision how about a keyboard as I am, but go to go and I'll just put on the metronome. I might be able to hear it just coming through the... Let's take one ear off my headphones to hear it. So let's give that a go. Do a couple of rounds because it'll just overdub. OK, so we've got something happening in there. That incidentally is the microfreak going through a TC Electronic flashback too. So let's go across our steps here and do what we did before and let's make sure they're not always playing. Perhaps we won't go quite as low as before. So maybe just sort of around 75ish. Just go through all of these. Randomness down or rather the probability down. And of course we can do similar tricks here. So perhaps we'll set this to walk mode. Perhaps we'll do random octave here. Randomize the order again. And the octave. Perhaps we'll randomize the order on this one as well. So with this final track, track three, that's the millilog which is running into the digitonica it's effect. I'm going to try something a little bit different. So what I'm going to do on this one is, I'm just going to set this last step to 7 or probably D. Move me too high. Well, oh look as we go. So what I want to do with this track is slightly different. I want to lay out various notes from a chord with long gate times and then lower the probability quite low. So what we get as it plays is this shifting chord, chordal accompaniment that's happening. So what key are we in? What key are we in? I think probably stuff based around F is going to be safe. Let's go longer than 7 as I last have. 9. Sure. Again, we'll come in here and we'll just start laying out notes from the chord. So F in there, C there, A there, the higher C, the higher F. Maybe we'll have the E in there, D in there to darken it up. E there as well. Be nice. So we'll come out with record mode going to step edit mode. And what I'm going to do coming through here is I'm going to set the gate times to 16, but then set the randomness pretty low, 16, and around pretty low. So what we should end up with here, once I've adjusted all these knobs, would be great if there was a way to adjust all of these all at once, or Torio if you are watching. It would be good to be able to modify several steps at once, I think. Turn that one down. Next one. Nearly there. Turn that one down. Turn that one down. Cool. Let's mute those two tracks and let's just see whether we have something popping up here. Okay, that needs to run way slower. So I'll set this one down to quarter notes. So you can hear now that we've got this drone that's happening, and the notes that are popping out of it. I suspect we could probably actually turn the probability down even lower than it was actually, so it's still quite high. We might want to balance that maybe by making the gate slightly longer. In some cases, it's quite long already. Yeah, that's more the feel we're going for. So now we've got this chord or thing happening here. And of course, same deal again. We can switch to a different sequence mode. I think maybe random makes sense for this one rather than walk. Let's bring in one of the other parts. And then when we feel like we need to shift what's going on here, perhaps we'll do a randomization of the octaves again. Quite interesting when we do it on our chord. And we're constantly taking those chopped up ideas, the contexts to them, or our musical scissors, making it less busy, always adjust our probability of our sequence steps. Again, it would be great if we could do this all at once. Sorry, please. That lovely, it's not turned up, got that lovely evolving droney pad happening. We need to shift things along. So anyway, friends, I hope you enjoyed that and found it interesting and hopefully it highlighted you a particular facet of Keystep Pro that maybe you hadn't considered. If you did enjoy the video, please do leave it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel because there's always more synth fun to be had. As always, thank you so much for joining me. Until next time, stay safe, take care. Bye-bye.