Lemur Control of ER-301

I use Patterning to control the modular - it’s a little bit of a pain to set up, but once done it’s great!

Actually, this is how I drive the ER-301 as a drum machine a lot of the time, either this or the Octatrack!

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At one point, it was high on my list to try. But the new Beatstep Pro firmware 2.0 covers a lot of what I was hoping to get out of it with the polyrhythms and pattern chaining. May still give it a go at some point, but like you say, there’s a bit of a setup work, whereas the BSP is pretty plug and play.

I guess you can send a lot more CC from Patterning though. BSP’s drum mode into modular is pretty much just triggers. :slight_smile:

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New video from Endorphin.es gives overview of Shuttle Control:

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Glad to see Endorphines pulled a video of this unit together. It’s so powerful, and it’s not immediately obvious what all it does. I need to start using more of those Bulcha-esque source of randomness outs. :slight_smile:

Yeah they are really useful… I have multiple sources of random, but always good to have more and up to 16 if I ever need them :smirk_cat:

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The ones that are tied to velocity (higher velocity increases randomness amount) are pretty intriguing. I think that would be kind of difficult to patch up with other modules, and really fun if actually playing a keyboard. Nice demo of it in that video. I hadn’t tried it out yet. The ER-301 and SC arrived pretty close together time-wise for me, so the 301 has been stealing most of the modular spotlight, of course. :wink:

One of my academic advisors (Matt Wright) is the co-inventor of OSC. He’s always been pretty open about exactly this topic.

His main point that he’s brought up is that the complete lack of standards is OSC’s greatest strength and weakness. His other point is that too many people view MIDI and OSC as similar/competing standards.

With MIDI: I buy a MIDI controller, I buy a MIDI-enabled instrument effect, I plug the controller in, and I’m ready to go. If the MIDI controller sends out notes, the MIDI instrument should respond immediately. At worst, I have to use Ableton’s MIDI Learn function to attach a controller knob to a control. Resolution is an issue.

With CV: I buy a device that generates voltages and plug it into a device that receives voltages. The biggest complication is voltage standards. Resolution is not an issue.

With OSC: I buy a controller, most of which are not documented well for total beginners. I then need to have knowledge of setting the sender/receiver addresses up. Typically, this revolves around learning an intermediate application, editor, or bridge. In many situations, you’re translating these high-resolution OSC messages into MIDI, since the thing you’re communicating with probably isn’t OSC aware. It is absolutely the most flexible and precise communication protocol around, but it doesn’t make a ton of sense for the musician->controller->instrument paradigm that most of the industry revolves around.

One of the biggest advantages of OSC over MIDI in my mind, though, is networking. If you have one controller communicating with a cluster of computers, or multiple musicians controlling some networked instrument, or something similar, there’s nothing better. At MAT, Matt had the CREATE Ensemble, which was a group of students who did exactly this. It was fantastic.

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Well said. Guess I’m just surprised not to see a few more OSC hardware devices on the market at this point. Even just a small bank of encoders for “when resolution counts.” :slight_smile:

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Agreed.

The Monome Arc is fantastic, but so expensive. It sends OSC delta messages (i.e. how many units the knob has travelled), so you can set it up to respond to the tiniest movements. The Ansible + Arc combo make for a very high-resolution offset generator for use with the ER-301.

One other point is that 14-bit MIDI is becoming more commonplace. I use a Faderfox UC4 for almost all of my MIDI duties and I haven’t run into issues there.

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Since we’re on the subject of OSC and Lemur… anyone who can guide me towards a good OSC-course…?

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Some great Lemur FH1+expander templates here from “djthopa”:
https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2924699#2924699
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