Hello,
Is it possible to program an arpeggiator in .lua for the E1? If not, it would be a really good feature.
We also can imagine other “MIDI FX”, but this one is the most important in my opinion.
Thank you.
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Technically, I think it’s possible to implement this in LUA, but it will require a fair amount of scripting.
It might be more feasible to use a third-party arpeggiator (eurorack module or MIDI plugin) and control that with the E1. But that highly depends on your use case.
Thanks for your response.
The best option would be an integrated arpeggiator or something that we could call quickly to integrate into a preset page.
The amount of work to create one from scratch and handle all the usual needs would take a tremendous amount of time for (IMHO) little gain. As @Mint-Gecko pointed out, there’s so many excellent hardware and software arpeggiators and sequencers out there with all kinds of features that would be better to use/integrate.
I don’t think most folks are approaching the E1 as a MIDI FX/processor type of box. Rather, it excels at providing a great UI to things that are otherwise difficult to edit or use in real time.
Part of the challenge is that there are no higher-level abstractions to make development of something like that easier. If you wanted to add skipping/pausing of steps and racheting (for example), you have to manage all the low-level logic and changes to the clocking or working the interrupt timing and buffering yourself.
Again, it certainly can be done, but it would have to be a dedicated labor of love to take on that task. It’s not something anyone can knock out in a weekend.
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You’re completely right. Nowadays, arpeggiators are often part of the MIDI keyboard itself. And for the MIDI FX box, or step sequencer, hardware like Hapax or Polyend Play are very good in that matter. Maybe I have to split my needs and choose hardware to meet specific ones.
Okay, I understand that it’s complex. I just expected maybe one or two native/user-friendly features in the side panel editor (conditional faders, MIDI LFO, MIDI envelope, transfer functions, etc.) in addition to sending MIDI messages (even if that’s already a huge amount of work, I admit).
The focus was a MIDI controller that was able to handle simple note/CC/NRPN messages as well as complex sysex dumps to and from external hardware.
For this purpose, it is the best thing I have used by far. I’ve been messing around with MIDI since the late 1980’s and this is a dream box for that use.
Industrious users in the community have extended the possibilities far beyond the original purpose and this has also been very cool.
But, it does require user engagement to get the extra functionality implemented.
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I am, that’s the primary reason I got it, to do programmatic MIDI manipulations on the fly.
That said timing based stuff is always a pain and I’ve focused more on event driven actions so far.
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I completey agree and I am aware of that. This is why we are discussing in the FR topic.
Do you have something to share with the community?
@NewIgnis made amazing stuff. He was presenting it as the Superbooth 22 with his Korg NTS-1. I made a few presets for generative sequencing.
Electra has been designed to be just on the edge of a musician’s tool and a nerdy device. I grew up during the Atari times and the device reflects that. I think anybody who is willing to get their hands dirty with Lua, can invent quite unique midi processing presets. The timer and transport Lua libraries are aimed towards MIDI tempo related applications. And as @Mint-Gecko mentioned in the other thread, it is important to be aware of the time constraints that the device offers.
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Thanks for your reply, Martin.