 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. The Polyone Play is a groovebox with 8 tracks of sample playback and 8 tracks of MIDI control. Leaving aside the beautiful array of LED pads, which door on the front panel, its main distinguishing feature is its focus on generative algorithmic and chan space tools, designed to help you quickly create and iterate on musical ideas. Much has been said and demonstrated on the play with regards to quickly creating often intricate beat-centric music, and rightly so, as that is an area where it excels, but many of the concepts and features on offer here play equally well in the world of ambient music. So that's all we'll be doing today, making use of these features to put together a little generative ambient piece to chill out to, to demonstrate the workflow and the sounds. In the interest of transparency, Polyend kindly sent me the play for free for the purposes of making videos on it, but I haven't otherwise been paid for making a video, and Polyend haven't asked for nor if they've been given any editorial oversight into the video's content. It won't be much of a surprise to any regular viewers, but this video is going to be pretty chill, and I'll be taking my time to build up the piece from scratch, but hopefully there'll be some nice mellow music to accompany the journey, so hopefully you'll join me. And if you have any questions or observations as we go, be sure to hit me up in the comments section. So I haven't plotted out this piece properly, but I have got a kind of plan and a kind of vibe that I'm going to go for, and I've loaded up some samples to start us along that kind of journey. So in terms of the samples I've got in here, I've got some piano samples, which I made myself, they're not the factory ones, the factory ones are quite hard sounding, nicely sampled, but quite hard. I've got some of these lap harp plucks here, which is from the factory settings, and then I've got a bunch of stuff that I recorded on my kalimba, both in terms of intervals, some kind of percussive stuff in there, and then some velocities. Yeah, so that's kind of what we're going for. In terms of the layout of the track, I was thinking for the first two tracks we'll do some kind of piano phrases, which are of different lengths, sort of poly metric things, which are going to kind of cross over each other and phase around. And then I'll try and create a sort of generative accompaniment which moves around the key to recontextualise those phrases. I thought we'd then do two or three tracks of more sort of ambient, maybe even some backwards masked stuff, might be fun. And then I wanted to have a little bit of percussion, sort of quite sparse I think to begin with, just because it kind of holds an ambient piece together sometimes. And then the other thing I want to be able to do is kind of progress the piece by making use of one of the particularly cool features on the play. So because we're going to be making use of generative ideas, which is pitch as well as a rhythm, the first thing we're going to do here is come into the menu and go into the scales menu, and I'm going to turn the scale filter on. What it means is that we get only play notes within the scale that we choose, and any of the randomness that we introduce that affects pitches will also always fall within this scale. So it means that we're able to use randomness, but it still kind of sounds right most of the time. So I'm going to choose a scale type here, and I think I'm going to go for the good old, where are we? Yeah, the good old standby of pentatonic minor. The pentatonic scales are really good for this kind of music because it's impossible to play two notes which sound bad next to each other. Basically there are no real discordant notes within there. The one downside of using the scale filters is that they are absolute and you can't break out them even if you want to. Currently you literally can't define a note outside that scale. So if you want to create tension when putting stuff outside the scale, you can't do it. But I think for our purposes that's going to be fine today. So on these first two tracks I want to have this kind of phasing, phrasing, probably a piano thing that's going on. And I want them to phase over each other rhythmically. So we're going to use that kind of polymetric idea. And it's really easy to set up on the play, so I can select the entire track here. And then in the track length I'm going to choose my length and I'm going to go for 23 for that one. And I'm going to go for 29 for that one. So we're choosing prime numbers here, just because that means that things don't repeat very often. Right, so let's find the first sound. I think there's a sound I'm going to go for, a piano sound. And I'm going to choose probably a pitch above where I want to go and then I'm going to tune it back down afterwards. So I'm going to find a nice rhythm then to find the notes afterwards. So I want to actually define the notes for these phrases. So let's start by putting down. Then we've got a bit of a wait. Okay, so let me pan this to one side so we can hear which one is which of the two phrases. So we'll just set up the panning for the other side for this one. So you can hear that these rhythms are never really repeating over each other. They're always phasing in and out with each other. Okay, that's good. So let's define their pitch a little bit. So the first thing we're going to do is I'm just going to bring the whole lock down and octave. Just because then we get that nice sort of tape slowed down kind of feel to it. Half speed is best speed as Heimbach will always tell us. I'm also going to just put a little bit of overdrive on these and maybe just drop the bit rate. Get some of that little bit of fuzz and air in the background. Okay, so let's choose some notes here. So maybe just mute one of these. Then we'll choose something for this side as well. Let's go down up first. So it's one lower instead. Quite like having that high note. Okay, let's see how those two sound together. Okay, yeah, let's do something neat I think. So at the moment this sounds kind of robotic and that's because each of these notes are changing pitch. They're all at the same velocity and that's kind of making it sound very sampled and sequenced. So let's make use of some of the generative features here to move that volume about a little bit. So I'm going to select the two tracks together. We're going to randomize here. The randomization type we're going to use is just volume. So we'll set our randomization amount. And this sets a range of a deviation from the current amount. Okay, so we'll hit save then that's going to apply that randomization that's just been generated and sort of bake it into the track. There we go. I'm just going to raise the overall volume of this as well I think and just drop the filter down a little bit. A little bit of resonance. Which will allow us to emphasize the top end. Right, let's think about this accompaniment part then. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put a single piano note here. And let's go, let's stick with this particular sample. We'll just drop it down lower I think. Okay, so now we have this repeated note over 16 steps. I'm going to make that a bit lower I think. Let's put that back in the middle shall we? Let's bring that sample down an octave or two. So now we have this repeated note there. Now we probably don't want it to be a C every time. So here we can make use of the chance to choose a random note each time or choose a random note sometimes actually. So the action I'm going to choose here is going to be a random note but because we've defined the scale it's always going to be in the right key. Okay, I just need to actually apply that to that step sorry. This is me thinking like it's a dig attack when it's not the dig attack. So now it's going to use a different note each time. I'm just going to recontextualize those phrases. But just choosing a random note every single step kind of robs it of structure a little bit. So what I'm going to do rather than having it change the note every time I'm going to define a chance based on repeats. So the setting I'm going to use is let's try play to skip to. So you have two random notes and then two goes back to the C each time. So we've got a random and C sort of root it back in the key. So C again and then we should have two random notes which then kind of give us that shift in accompaniment that's getting somewhere. Alright, let's think about what we want to do next. I think what we want to do next it is slap some reverb on these parts especially on these two. So we'll select the whole of those two tracks and we'll just come to the reverb send here and I'm just going to turn up the reverb amount. So this is using one of the built-in reverb presets but we can actually set how we'd like now so let's do that. So we can come into settings here into master effects rather and rather than in here where we've got different presets we can choose custom and then we can define it. I think I was playing around with something earlier because that sounds nice. Yeah, so I might use this. I was playing around with this earlier. What I've done here is I've got the dampen fairly loud, I've got the size quite big and I've turned the diffusion down so it's not smearing the reverb so much but we're hearing a bit more of the individual echoes inside the reverb which I was really like. That's more texture. And already this is kind of perfectly pleasant to listen to I think. Let's take a moment to breathe and think about where we're going to take this next. I think what I want to do next is bring in some percussive elements, just something sparse but just to ground the piece as it is. So I'm going to use these bottom two tracks to keep out the way of my melody area here. So let's choose a sample, we'll come into the folder. I want my taps and knocks which is just me tapping and knocking on my kalimba. Cool. We'll make use of the fill functionality to populate this stuff. So let's choose a length for these two tracks. We can go quite short because I'm going to make use of some Euclidean spoiler alert techniques. So let's go something like 12 on that one. And 11 on that one. Let's try that. Yeah, so we've got 12 and 11 there. Cool. So we've chosen just one of the samples for the moment. And I will select this first structure has 12 steps and I'm going to come into fill here. And the type I'm going to choose is Euclidean. And I'm going to choose a length. Generally speaking I go odd numbers on an even numbered track. It just seems to work nicely. So I'm going to do three, no wait, that divides nicely. Let's go five. Five into the 12 there and hit fill and that's going to populate those tracks. So now on this next track here which has 11, we'll do a similar sort of thing. Euclidean there will go four into the 11 perhaps. That's all a bit much at the moment so let's pan these things so we can hear what's going on. Obviously sonically this isn't super pleasant at the moment. So I'm going to do a couple of things to it. First I'm just going to filter down a bit and take some of that. Then I'm also going to shorten it and let's also do that randomization on the volume that has more sort of movement in sort of back to front side of things. And then let's bring in some chance here and in terms of the chance that we're going to bring in I think let's go with the random sample. Probably not always so we still have that kind of knocking. Give it some overdrive. Let's set the custom parameters for that. Let's just take a moment to enjoy how aesthetically easy it is to watch all the tracks move across. I want to get a bit more sort of ambient kind of weird stuff going on here. So let's just move a couple of these tracks so we can hear what we're doing a bit better. I'm going to choose some of these intervals. So I was wondering if I could do some backwards masked stuff here. So to reverse the sample on the Polym Play it's slightly awkward. Frankly it'd be nice to just have a reverse feature. But what you do is you set the start to the end and the end to the start basically. So we'll do that right now. So we need to actually apply it to that step. Let's try that again. That's something isn't it? Let's darken that bit. Okay. Get a bit more saturation into it. Get some reverb. Now again somewhere. Okay. Let's see what happens if we go for a random note on that. Okay. That's cool. Right. I think what we'll do is slow this track down so it's not happening quite so often. Okay. Let's turn off the random note here. Let's turn off the random note here and let's slow this track right the way down. Tempo. Track speed. Which one of you synchronizes? Okay. So we've got a much slower track now and I'm going to just put one of these down. Every other track length actually on this track. So that's happening just every time there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use randomize here and use it to randomize the pitch within one octave. Two octaves, a bit more space. Okay. Let's bake that in. Let's chance instead to lower the chance of one of these playing. Before we do that actually, let's pan them as well. So pan them individually. Give them some space. Okay. So chance. Send it down to like, try 30. Let's bring some of this stuff back in. Okay. Follow me. This is too high. So we'll turn that down a bit. Cool. Yeah. So this track, let's set its length to 14. No. Yeah. It's 14. Sure. And let's see if we can just get this to generate an entirely random useful thing. Let's see if we can do that. So we'll use fill to put down random notes. It's as simple there. That's nice. It's the pitch here. Also the clipper is slightly out of tune. So let's just slow that down by half. The chance here just to have it skip notes occasionally. But given that worked quite well, let's try the same trick again. But maybe go up. So for this track, we'll set the length sort of to 14 on that one. So let's do on this one. We'll use the random fill again, I think. Fill those notes. We'll just listen to hear something we like every time we change the randomize account. Also let's apply that randomization. I think again we'll slow this track down because these two are quite dry at the moment. So let's give them some reverb send. Again on this one, let's lower the chance that a step actually plays. Yeah. That's nice. So let's have a little think about how we can evolve this from a performance standpoint. One of the most sort of underrated features I think on the play is the variation feature. So we're kind of used to the idea with groove boxes that we have multiple different patterns. And by changing patterns, you're changing to a different pattern. Right. So that's a different pattern to the one I was just playing. And here's the pattern I was just playing. And we can switch between them during a performance and you're moving to entirely different patterns. Or almost entirely different songs or different sections of a song. Right. That's how most groove boxes tend to organize stuff. And you've got that on the play. What you also have on the play is this idea of variations. The variations work on a per track basis. So although we've got all of these different patterns within a single pattern, each track then has 16 different variations that we can switch between. So on this one track here, I can switch to a different variation. It's currently empty because we haven't built any variations yet. But it allows us to evolve just this one track here while leaving the rest of the piece alone. So if you want to create pieces which evolve over time, you can bring in different ideas without completely rebuilding the pattern every single time. This is an incredibly powerful feature. I think it's really, really underrated. And I didn't really get it when I first looked at the play. But now that I've played with it, I kind of wish my other groove boxes could do this as well. So let's look at how we can maybe evolve this track using the variations. So I think maybe a good place to start playing with this is in these rhythmic tracks here. Because that's obviously a really obvious way to start to evolve the sort of the push of the track. So let's just mute off some of these friends here. And what I'll do is I'll select this top of the two here and I'll copy it. I'll go into its first variation here. I can paste the same thing in here. Select this track first, sorry. So now we have two variations which contain the same note information, but we can start to make use of other ideas in here to evolve this particular track. So I think one of the first things we could do is add an additional note event course. And let's make sure this is in the right sample of course. And I thought maybe we could bring in some of the repeats as well. So these are like ratchets. It's not really working, are they? Let's try three over. So we've now made this track a bit more busy by introducing some additional notes and making use of some of the repeats. So if we go back to our initial variation here, things a bit more sparse. First variation. Let's do the same thing for this other rhythmic track here. So we'll copy that, make sure it's first variation. Some sort of work flow, that's some repeats. Cool, yeah. Shorten the sample a bit when we get busier. Maybe also pan things back to the first variations. And then let's maybe have a final variation which is just like what hit. So it's much, much sparser. So let's come into the third variations for each of them. And we'll just stick a single. Still got the repeat turned on because I copied a step by accident by quite like. Cool, so now we've got much, much sparser variation that we can move into there as well. Let's maybe think about variations for our melodies as well. So I'll copy this first one again. Move across to its first variation. Paste it in. And I thought what we could do for this one is just introduce a little bit more randomness into this one. So just remind myself what we're doing for chance. We're not doing anything for chance which is great because that allows us to easily introduce some randomness here. So maybe for a few of these notes, maybe these last three notes here, we can select all of them. We can introduce some random note chance in here. So action, random note. So now we have a version here which evolves naturally. So that's cool. That's actually the same for this one, same idea. I think that works really nicely as a way to evolve things. So we'll copy that one. Move across to its next variation. Track has to complete before it moves across to a variation. I'm sure it takes a little second there. Paste that in, lovely. And again, we won't do all of the notes random because it's nice to sort of ground it in something that repeats. We'll select those ones. And again, we will... Maybe on this accompaniment part, we'll add another note event in. Ding, ding, maybe like that. So we'll just copy this one again. Move across to the next variation and paste it in. So samples, let's move back to our piano. Okay, things are getting cut off a little bit there but we can deal with that a little bit. It needs to be lower, generally speaking. Fade out faster, we can probably get another click then. Let's have this be random every time as well. So now we have a couple of different variations that we can bring in to evolve our track beyond just music stuff. We'll have to massage this a little bit to deal with that a little bit though. And of course we can do similar things for these tracks here as well. But I think we've got something nice here. And we can go on and evolve this further. I think we'll leave it here for today. This is already a very long video. So thank you so much for joining me on this little ambient journey with the play. If you enjoyed the video then as always, a like and subscribe is massively appreciated. Till next time.