Hello, I need to create some simple drum machine patterns that I plan on triggering live. Right now I have Battery, which works great for triggering one-off drum sounds using my Roli Block, but I need to do some simple sequenced patterns and stuff. I’ve been looking around for a sequencer VST that I can feed midi information into. I don’t need anything fancy. Honestly, something with a drum machine-like interface would be ideal. Does anyone have any experience with a good, solid plugin that works well with GP? This is for MacOS (M1 - ideally native apple silicon support), btw.
No experience with this apart from quick testing. It has 8 patterns (4 layers for each). You can switch patterns with midi (it also has midi learn for this) and I was able to set this up with widgets connected to a midi in block.
Free/open source. Unsure about M1 - but maybe you could build your own? Others here may have knowledge about building M1 compatible JUCE plugins.
I was even able to get it to record midi patterns from EZdrummer3’s midi out, which was cool!
A few key settings I think are helpful:
- It defaults to probability ‘Prob Mode’ setting of ‘Mono’. Change this to ‘Poly’, which then gives each note you program a default 100% probability - it displays ‘On’ for each programmed note.
- Set ‘Scale’ to ‘Custom’ will allow you to manually alter the note sent for each row in the sequencer. You can also double-click to the left of the note number to add the name/description:
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Perhaps review some of these step sequencer plugins
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FYI - I just tried the free version of the first one mentioned, Harvest-MINI, seems to work very well connected to NI Battery
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When I tested Harvest mini a while back, it didn’t save your patterns in the plugin state, so was blank again when reloading the gig. Not sure if that has been fixed?
I also didn’t like that you couldn’t trigger a note manually from the piano roll in order to confirm what you were triggering downstream.
The one I mentioned has both of these features working.
EDIT: change log for the paid version of Harvest indicated it took 2 years from the original release for:
Harvest now recalls its state when host’s project file is saved and loaded
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As I said, I just downloaded the free one and made a pattern, I didn’t even try to save it….was just curious….I don’t use drum sequencers myself.
But there seemed to be plenty from which to choose.
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awesome! thank you (and everyone). I use and really like Surge Synth anyway, so this looks great. Yea, I don’t deal much in this area either. I’ll give Stochas a shot and look at some of the other ones on that list
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OK so this is weird. I’m sure it’s user error, but I can’t figure out what happened. So I set up a song using Battery and Stochas. Basically my goal was to create a pattern I could kick off with the transport controls and control the speed with tap tempo (to match the drummer). It all worked great… for one day. I came back this morning and whenever I hit the play button in GP (whether with a controller or the actual button), the sequencer won’t play. Arpeggiators work fine (on other plugins) grabbing the tempo and stuff, I just can’t seem to get this thing to fire off. It doesn’t have its own transport controls from what I can tell.
Do I need to send midi into the plugin in order for a plugin to respond to transport controls? Or should it just “work”?
I’m going to grab the Harvest Mini plugin and test that to see if it’s the VST or if it’s something in GP
weird… So I saved the plugin state as a GP preset. I opened a new instance of it and recalled the preset. Worked absolutely fine. So I replaced the plugin that was in there and it now works again.