So, you’ve probably noticed by now that all of my suggestions for Random are tending towards the percussion side of things. The prior tip was a slight deviation, but so far I’ve been focusing in that area because getting random pitches to do things that are musically coherent opens a whole other can of worms. Today, a bit more on the percussion tip, then we’ll move on…
Let’s say you want to add a bit more realism to a hi hat part.
Drop a Random into the hi hat chain. This way it will only process the MIDI notes that trigger the hi hat.
Take a look at the Mode setting, and you’ll notice that I’ve changed it from Rnd to Alt. In this mode, Random will output every possible note (as determined by Choices and Scale) in order, instead of choosing notes at random.
With the setup shown above, Chance is set to 100%, so every time a note is input, the next note in the sequence will be output. Choices is set to 2, so this means that every other note will be transposed up one semitone.
This is a good start, but sonically you may find that transposing the sample a semitone sounds a bit obvious. We’ll take a look at some solutions to this next.
