Kit Generator

With the 1.1.0 update, PercX has received a new Kit Generator that lets you generate brand new kits out of all available instruments with a single click.

You can roll the dice and combine random instrument with each other and even augment the randomness with advanced composition rules to create musical kits that fit into your musical compositions!

In order to use the Kit Generator, click the Generator button next to the Kit Browsers search bar. This will exchange the Kit Browser with the Kit Generator and the right area of each instrument track with individual track options for the generator.

Before we dive into the deeper layers of the generator, let's get familiar with the simple use cases:

Press the big Generate Button in the middle of the browser to generate a randomly selected kit out of all instruments. You'll be hearing a completely new kit that nobody has ever heard before! Press it again to get a new kit. Press it again to get a new kit. Aaaand: Press it again to get a new kit.

If you found some tracks that match your taste, you can always lock the sound or patterns with the Lock Modes and proceed with generating random combinations for the other tracks.

In this way you can keep the good stuff, discard the trash and come up with interesting material pretty quickly.

If you just want to re-generate a single track, press on the single generate buttons on the right of each track. If you want to do so with a bunch of tracks (eg. track 1, 2 and 6), just select the tracks and press the big fat generate button on the bottom. You'll notice that the to-be-generated tracks are been highlighted with the 8 bullet lights below the button like this:.

This is the basic functionality and should be enough to keep you entertained for a while. However this is just the tip of the iceberg, so in order to harvest the full possibilities, keep on reading.

Quicksave

The 1.3.0 update added the ability to quickly save the current kit as preset with a single click. If the generator created something you like, just click on this button:

It will create a category for each day and name the presets consecutively, so in order to load previously saved kits, just click on the top bar, choose Browse and navigate to the presets.

As soon as there are any presets, you can also use the arrow buttons in the top bar to switch between them.

You can use it to create a batch of interesting kits and then reevaluate them later in the composition process.

Kit Filter

The left column of the kit browser (that showed the collections) is being replaced with the Generators Kit Filter. This can be used to prefilter the kits for the generation process. Whenever you change one of the three filters (Collection, Time Signature or Tempo), the number of matching kits will be updated so you can make sure that there's still enough content for a good randomization.

Collection

The factory collections in PercX are (very loosely) categorized into different styles and by exluding some collections you can nudge the musical output into a certain direction (eg. if you're not into heavy-weight trailer stuff, deactivating HYBRID PULSE will result in a little bit more softer kits).

Time Signatures

You might have noticed that in some cases, the time signatures of the generated individual tracks didn't match which created poly-rhythmic structures. If you're into that kind of style, it's great, but sometimes you just need a good ol' 4/4 time signature without too much funk. In this case, just select either the 2-time-based or 3-time-based filter.

Tempo

Another option is to make sure that the kits have more or less the same tempo: A kit with a default tempo of 60BPM will have a different structure both in sound and pattern than a fast kit and by reducing the tempo range you can make sure that the kits that are selected as raw material for the generation fit inside the project tempo within one of the given ranges (+-20 BPM or +-40BPM)

Parameter Map

There are two important parameters that influence the generators output:

• How many kits should be used as pool for the instrument randomization.
• How many random patterns swaps should be applied. (Like in "locking the sound and changing the pattern")

You can control these parameters using the XY pad in the right side window:

The y-axis (#KITS) will set the amount of kits for the generator to pick from (1 (bottom) to 16 (top)).

The x-axis (#PATTERN SWAPS) will determine the amount of rhythm patterns out of the filtered instrument pool that are being swapped with each other from zero (left) to all of'em (right). This makes it pretty intuitive to use: if you start at the bottom left, it will basically just load a single kit without modifications. The more you go to the top-right it will start getting more and more experimental with results that might sound glitchy, but can also deliver some killer combinations that you would never have thought of.

Be aware that if you add too many filters & rules, the random generator might not be able to find enough material that matches all criterias (and blink red). In this case you might need to increase the number of kits.

Track Options

The Kit Generator can be used as source of inspiration to quickly come up with new ideas with zero conditions. However, in most cases you already have a certain musical style in mind and pressing the generate button until the result matches what you're after might not be the most efficient solution.

That's where the Track Options come in which will allow you to define parameters how the kit should be structured and add in composition tricks to make the to-be-generated kits musically more consistent.

The track options are divided into Pairing (left) and Track Filter (right) and both can be accessed by clicking on the UI element to see their respective popup.

Finding the right amount of track filters / pairing rules is an art of its own: the more modifiers you add the more specific the created kit will be but if you overuse it you'll end up with either no or always the same kit.

Track Filter

The filter popup lets you define criterias to match patterns (TYPE , PULSE ) and instruments (CATEGORY , ATTRIBUTES ) for the Generators selection process.

You can add as many filters as you like but be aware that you might end up with no matches (as soon as you add a filter, the amount of Matches will update, so you can see how many filters you can apply while maintaining a healthy randomness).

Type

All instrument patterns in PercX are categorized into one of four types:

Name	Example	Description
Rhythm		A distinctive rhythmical motive
Straight		A steady rhythm (eg. a ticker or a 4 to the floor bass drum).
Hit		a pattern that has only few notes at the start of the measure.
Rise		a pattern that has a build up (and heavily utilizes the preroll).

A good kit has a healthy combination of all of those 4 types (you might imagine how a KIT that consists of 8 Rise tracks will sound), so this is a good place to start building a musical KIT.

Pulse

Here you can choose the pulse of the pattern. The pulse of the pattern is its smallest rhythmical unit. But be aware that the automatic pulse detection algorithm of PercX uses a threshold with an certain error of margin. So, if you have eg. a straight quarter beat with a single ghost note on a sixteenth pulse, the resulting pulse will still be quarters:

By combining tracks with different pulses you can create a more interesting kit structure. However if you just need a sixteenth pulse to match your arpeggiated synth, setting everything to the this pulse might suit you better in this context.

Category

The instrument filter categories that you know from the Kit browser. The only new thing here is that you get two new "meta" categories: Treble and Bass that contain the following categories:

Treble	Bass
Wood, Hi Hats, Cymbals, Metal	Big Drums, Kick Drums, Sub, Kit Toms

Attributes

The Attributes allow a more fine grained control over the instrument selection. There are five pairs of attributes that you can enable to filter out instruments that you don't want to end up in the generated kit:

• Pitch: Low / High
• Sustain: Short / Long
• Transient: Soft / Sharp
• Ambience: Dry / Wet
• Organic: Raw / FX

You might recognize these attributes from the Attribute sliders that appear on the left of the instrument column in the Kit browser and yes it's using the same metadata. However that means that these attributes are distributed for each category (so a low hi-hat will still be much higher than a high big drum). As a result, using these attributes with "Any" might cause some inconsistent results.

Be aware that there are some sounds that are "in between" these matches which will also be excluded as soon as you define an attribute: some sounds eg. don't qualify as "soft" or "sharp" so whenever you click on one of those attributes, it will also exlude anything that's in the middle of those two.

This rationale behind this is that it increases the effect of the attribute: if you explicitely select the attribute "dry", you don't want instruments that are "medium dry" to pollute your results.

Pairing

While the Track Filter lets you define the "input" for the generator by setting requirements that must be met by the possible instrument candidates, the Pairing popup will give you the option of connecting tracks with each other and create musical interactions between tracks.

The simplest form of a connection is to copy the pattern of one track to the other - just like locking the sound of a track and dragging another instruments pattern on it. This so called "pairing" between two tracks can be done by dragging the Pairing symbol from the source track to the target track or selecting another track as source track in the SOURCE part of the popup. Any track that is paired to a source track will show the source tracks index number in an icon like this:

As you can directly see in the waveform, the resulting pattern looks quite similar - but not identical (because it's played by another instrument). As soon as two tracks are paired, everytime you will hit the generate button, it will generate a new pattern for the upper track and then copy it to the lower track. The lock functionality also applies here: if you've found a good sound for an accompagnying track, just set it to Lock Sound. It will use the same instruments sound but copy just the pattern from the source.

Protip: Try pairing a HIT and a RISE type with this simple copy pattern. Each buildup of the RISE track should be triggering a impact from the HIT.

Pairings are not exclusive. You can pair multiple tracks with a single source track to create more consistent kit structures. You can even have one "lead" track and pair every other track to this track. Now, if you just apply the simple copy pattern pairing to the other 7 tracks, the result will be pretty boring (because everything will play the same thing). This is where the advanced pairing tools come in. They will take the source pattern, copy it to the target track and then apply a set of operations on it.

As soon as you've created a pairing by dragging one track to another, PercX will show a popup that allows the customization of this pairing (and you can open that popup again by clicking on the Pairing icon).

Source

The column on the left shows the connected source. If you want to remove the pairing, just select Random as source and it will not copy the pattern from the other track anymore.

Pairing

If the pairing is active, you can choose one of the four pairing types for this track.

Copy

The default pairing: Takes the source pattern and copies it to the target track.

Call and Response

This takes the source pattern and distributes it to source and target: first bar to source, second bar to the target. Be aware that this is the only pairing that actually modifies the source track, but you can get similar effects with a clever combination of the post operations (see below).

Accent fill

Copies the pattern from the source track and fills it "ghost notes" in the pulse of the source pattern. It also applies slight dequantisation and velocity randomization to make the result more musical.

Complement Rhythm

Creates the complementary rhythm of the source pattern (so that it plays a note for each rest in pulse). If you look closely you'll see that it randomizes the accents in the velocity (however it favors the "main" beats) so that it does not just sound like a technical excercise for a drummer.

Post FX

In addition to these pairings, you can also perform elementary operations on the rhythms to further process the rhythms after they have been paired. This gives you the toolset of building a complex rhythmic structure out of a single lead rhythm.

These operations can be combined, however their order of execution is fixed from top to bottom. Every operation has a single parameter that controls the frame size of the operation.

Each explanation of an operation here features an example screenshot to visualise what it does. The first track is always the original track and the second the processed pattern.

Swap

Slices the pattern into chunks of the given size and swaps odd and even parts. The example shows a frame size of a quarter note.

The swap operation creates a more subtle "call and response" effect than the actual pairing (plus it doesn't affect the source material).

Invert

Slices the pattern into chunks of the given size (in this case, 1 Bar) and reverses these parts.

Gap

Slices the pattern into chunks of the given size (a quarter note in this example) and removes the notes in the odd slices.

The gap operation is pretty useful to "slow down" straight rhythms. If you take a straight pattern with 1/8 pulse and apply a 1/8 gap on it, you effectively get a 1/4 straight pattern.

Shift

Moves the pattern to the right by the given amount and wraps the overlapping end to the beginning. The example shows a frame size of an eight note.

You can create an offbeat rhythm with this in combination with the Gap operation. Or you can simulate Call and Response by applying a 1 bar gap to the source track and shift the target track by 1 bar.

Other UI controls

On the bottom of this popup you will find a few more UI controls which offer some workflow enhancements (basically the most important operations that you might want to do without having to close and reopen that popup):

• The three buttons in the middle: Generate (same as clicking the generate button on the single track), undo and redo.
• The Dynamics slider: scales the velocity so you can quickly adjust the dynamics of the to-be-generated track. This mirrors the exact same functionality as the standard Dynamics knob , it's just there for convenience.
• Lock Source: If you enable this button, it will save/lock the current state of the track and only apply the Post FX operations on it. This is useful if you want to check what each of those operations does: applying eg. a gap operation consecutively with different frame sizes will slowly delete all notes if you don't reset it after each operation. Or if you like a certain pattern but want to modify it a little bit.

Blueprints

As we might have learned in the previous chapters, the Kit generator is a quite powerful tool with many settings and parameters. You quickly can loose yourself in tweaking the filters and pairings in trying to come up with a good "blueprint" for kits that spits out one musical gem after another. Once you've found a good setting, you might want to save it to use it as template for your next projects.

Good news is you can: the blueprint file format is an independent file (just a plain XML file) that stores the entire settings of the Kit Generator and can be restored later on. In order to load (save or clear) the current blueprint, just use the hamburger icon in the middle section next to the big generator button.

Be aware that lock states and other track parameters like volume or pan are not stored in a blue print.