The BOTANICA Sequencer: First Look at My New Project transcript

Hey everyone, welcome to this new video. I'm excited to show you something that I've been working on the past couple of months to a half a year and you probably know my channel for my modular synthesizer videos, but recently I've been really enjoying learning how to make my own things and it's good to note that I am a drummer and a musician. I have absolutely no background in electronics or that kind of thing, but I always, you know, had this dream and excitement like what if I could make something myself and that's how this came about.

So what you see here is Botanica. It's a hardware MIDI sequencer that you can connect to your DAW or to a hardware synth and it generates very pleasing, very musical, organic, [snorts] natural sounding sequences. And in this video I'm going to show you a little bit of about how it works, what it does. It's not going to be like a complete demo, but more you know, taking you on the journey of how I started and where we are now, which is this.

It's the first prototype. It's not finished. It works. It does a lot of things of what I want it to do, but there's going to be, you know, play testing and there's going to be updates and fixes. So there's still a lot of work to do to to get this to a state where I can do maybe five to 10 of these to build as a kit or sell to anybody who's interested. >> [music] >> Um but I figured I've come this far and it works. It It makes music.

So, I thought it'd be fun to show you in a video. Um yeah, uh what I've been doing. So, enjoy. Um if you like uh what you see, leave a comment. Uh if you want to stay up-to-date, there's a link in the description to get notified of updates on this project. Um you can help playtest, provide feedback. Uh so, if if you enjoy what you're seeing and you'd like to get involved, um yeah, uh see the link in the description and uh join in.

So, Botanica, it's a MIDI sequencer. So, it's not a Eurorack sequencer or anything. Um you connect it to your DAW using a a USB cable and that's it. Um it instantly get gets recognized, no drivers [music] needed. Um so, I'll take you uh on a a little demo just to give you an impression of uh what the idea behind the sequencer is, what it can do, and uh hopefully you'll enjoy what you hear. Um so, on the surface, um it kind of looks like what a lot of sequencers do.

It has a little bit of, you know, Euclidean sequencing going on, uh some generative things that you may recognize from Marbles or Qubit Bloom. Um but there's also a lot of my own, yeah, uh musical ideas and stuff that I like uh my music to sound kind of worked into um the thought of uh how this sequencer operates. So, the individual features can be found on other sequencers, but I think the combination is what makes it sound [music] uh the way it does.

So, without further ado, let's jump in and just make some sounds and along the way I'll explain [music] the the controls and the stuff that I'm doing. So, length and hits, the sequence length and the amount of hits in the sequence, um it's kind of the basis. So, let's add some hits. It starts making making these hits. And this is this is basically the core and then all of the rest are uh embellishments on that core sequence.

So, if you set the length and the hits in in a non-symmetrical way, that's how you get your typical Euclidean uh rhythms. So, uh it Yeah, that's just the way it works. Um So, there is no Euclidean mode or anything. It's just if you set your length your sequence length and hits in a certain way, um yeah, you you get Euclidean style rhythms. Um so, you'll notice it currently hits on one tone. And the generative part is I'll seed some tones.

And now you can hear it plays a sequence in in a set of tones. And um everything you're you're going to dial in with your knobs is non-destructive. So, you can always go back to this kind of core sequence. So, the rest is embellishments, add-ons, modulations, but you can also dial it back. And then you're back to your sequence that you you hear. Right. So, nothing too exciting here right now. This is all basic, but let's start adding some interesting things.

So, I'll start with the blossom, which um um adds MIDI repeats with varying velocities and different styles. And that can sound very nice. So, this is chance that it starts adding some of these MIDI note repeats. And refract is a multiplier and division of these repeats. >> [music] >> So, currently it it kind of sounds like a timed delay. Or like these, you know, little marimba frills. You can set the decay of how long these repeats kind of take to fade out.

And it gets really interesting when we add some additional modes. So, for example, if I turn on the arpeggiator, uh these blossom repeats on top of the tones, they also get arpeggiated. Which can sound very pleasing. So, I'll turn down the the chance that the blossom repeats fires. So, the amount of hits in your sequence is like the base, and then this decides the chance that it kind of fires these repeats. Uh we can also go very slow.

So, now it does fire these repeats, but they go slower than the main sequence. Let's go a little bit faster again. So with the offset, you can currently these repeats fire instantly but you can delay them into the future using the offset. So now you're hearing the main hit and then the blossom repeats come later. So let's go into this mode. It's a chord mode, so it creates a chord voicing based on your melody you have going.

So you can make that sound like a little strumming kind of thing. I'll add a little bit of random modulation so it alternates between different clock divisions and multiplications for the blossoms. So we you can get slower and faster variations. So let's dial all of this back right now. So we can we kind of go back to a base mode. And um let's start again with a maximum sequence length of 16. We'll add in a couple of hits.

Let's add quite a bit of hits. Let's proceed for a new melody. We can transpose it in octaves or in semitones. You can adjust the rate of just how many notes you get from high to low. And we can use season to go to a different scale. So, for example, let's go into fall, which is more like a minor moody uh sounding [music] scale. Let's go a little bit lower. >> [music] >> Right. So, another control is a prune. Uh so, in Botanica, it's all about, you know, gardening, growing, >> [music] >> and currently we've added a lot of hits.

Um which can sound a little like, you know, samey. There's not really a musicality to it. So, with prune, you can trim away parts of your sequence. And that actually sounds different than just [music] having a few hits. So, you can create space by not adding as many hits. But if I create a dense sequence and then use prune to leave some gaps, you can kind of get these call and response type um sequences, which sounds more musical and more intentional, like how a composer would have written it instead of just, you know, the purely random generative sounding stuff.

So, with evolve, we can add, for example, if I set it to one, the sequence uh creates an A and a B version. So, every other sequence, it repeats phrase A and then phrase B phrase B. >> [music] >> And we can add everything else on top. So, let's add some blossoms back. >> [music] [music] >> And if we put the evolve up, um it creates an AMB version but repeats the first one two times and then a variation two times. And if I continue dialing up, it goes to percentages and this is now the chance that new tones get introduced.

And that is currently the only kind of permanent mutation. So once it generated a new tone, that's then your new base sequence. But this is nice for ambient kind of generative stuff where you want the sequence to continually evolve based on chance. Right, so I've uh loaded up a new sound. I'm using Force uh Tella, which is a great sounding modal uh synthesis uh plugin. And uh let's play around some more with what we've going on.

Um Again, I usually go left to right, so I'll just start to dial in a sequence and then kind of shape it to to something that I like. So let's start by adding a few hits. Let's increase the range a bit so we can get lower and higher tones. >> [music] >> Let's start adding some some subtle timed blossom repeats. >> [music] >> Let's uh turn the arpeggiator. The The interesting thing here is that it you know, it's it's just one sequence, but a lot of my thought that went into the sequencer is I don't want it to sound random like, you know, marbles can generate random stuff, but it it always sounds a little bit random, you know.

Um and this to me sounds like a musician playing and you know, jamming on his marimba. Um and with these blossom repeats uh interplaying, a lot of the time it sounds [music] like two players kind of riffing off each other, which can sound very beautiful. Let's transpose a little bit. So, we'll add a variation with evolve. >> [music] >> And if ever you want to make your your sequence less busy, you can either prune, trim away some parts, or have less repeats.

So, let's dial down the chance that blossom repeats happen. Let's turn up the prune, which kind of carves away from the base sequence. >> [music] >> And this is all non-destructive, so you your your core sequence is untouched. So, we can always, you know, turn back these knobs and you're back at your your base sequence. So, let's press C to generate some new tones. Let's make the sequence in it a little bit busier in the core.

Use prune to trim away and kind of shape things. I'll use a different mode to shaping it. Let's add a little chance of these repeats. Let's play with the offset of the blossom repeats a little bit. So, they happen later. And that can kind of go over your 16 sequence length. So, 16 step sequence is not the max. Everything you add on top kind of can extend it way beyond the the 16 steps. Let's transpose it down an octave.

Let's go into chord mode instead of arpeggiator. Let's see if we can kind of get some strumming effect. >> [music] [music] >> Right. Beautiful. So, there we go. That's uh a first early impression of the Botanica sequencer that I've uh designed and built and working on. Um again, this is a first prototype. So, uh some of the things you see on the panel um might change a little bit over the course of the development. I'm currently working on um working through a lot of uh fixes and small mistakes that you know, went into this uh first prototype design.

And the next version is hopefully going to be the first version that I will be able to you know, to sell as a DIY kit or an assembled unit. And uh again, if you'd like to get involved, if you want to help, you know, play test, provide feedback, uh and stay up-to-date, see the link in the description. Uh there is a a small quaint Discord server that you can join to hang out and uh follow along with the development and my journey.

And uh yeah, it's appreciated if you want to help in any way. Everything uh goes a long way in helping making this project uh come alive. Thanks for watching and uh until the next video. Bye-bye.