Since my last post on this, which was almost 2 years ago, a lot has changed, and I've been very busy. I had a brief detour into trying to incorporate my laptop, establishing a parity with Ableton using a floatingpoints multiclock - which, while it worked, turned out to be the wrong move in the end and resulted in some technical problems at the two February gigs.

I now have a Pimidi instead of a Pisound, so that I can talk to MCL and MM separately. I've broken the barrier of 128 patterns+kits entirely, through quite a ridiculous system of drip-feeding pattern+kit sysex into the Monomachine on the fly, as and when required, at a very slow rate so as to not disrupt the realtime messages (clock & transport) coming in. Sort of like picking up railtracks from behind you and placing them down in front so the train can keep going.

The rate of change, and a sense of everchanging variety, have always been big priorities with my sets, so having so many patterns has always been a natural result of that for me.

I've also been using a modified MCL firmware which allows for loading projects over sysex, duplicating projects, etc. which prompted trying to make good on my 'mtracks' idea that I briefly mentioned in the last post. By expanding on the mset format I now have a trk field which designates 'track groups' that can be swapped in and out, making it much easier to manage live sets in terms of tracks rather than one big stream of consciousness. MCL projects act as an analogue for my mtracks. For the MM sysex, this is simpler as I just have folders of syx data.

Another effort has been the custom Monomachine firmware I am creating, which I used in my set earlier this month. Currently the headline features are trig conditions, per-track loop lengths and a 'control all' feature similar to the Machinedrum. I had always used MCL's ext seq tracks to sequence the Monomachine when I wanted to use conditions and different track lengths, but this was cumbersome when combined with the sysex drip-feeding system, as note / CC data would corrupt sysex data, meaning the engine that decides when to send sysex needed a way to shut itself off to let note data pass through and try again - not ideal. That's what prompted me to try and bring these features to the Monomachine natively.

I also have a cat now, his name is Bailey.