Save ability in Polybeats patches

HI guys, you ever have a seriously ripping pattern playing that you randomly created with a Polybeats patch, only to
accidentally hit the Aux button and it clears it out, and you cannot recreate that magical polyrhythm???
I have, numerous times, and i wasn’t recording, and really wished I knew how to create a Save option
for a Polybeats patch in PD…
Anyone care to lend any knowledge?
Thanks!!!

3 Likes

Polybeats is the best. Support any expansion of this patch :smiley:

2 Likes

:notes: I could not possibly agree more that any expansion of this patch would be niiiiiice :notes:

1 Like

Yet to get in to PD myself but in general my only disappointment with some organelle patches is how some appear quite un-optimised. I guess that’s part of the open source/community thing but for someone struggling to find time to learn the patches, let alone start to learn PD, it can be frustrating to regularly be thinking ‘dang, this patch is so close to perfect!’.

Many great patches seem to miss either -
-Ability to save presets (and I also wonder why there isn’t a scrollable presets system within any patches? Browsing a patch’s presets blind, up/down through them one at a time isnt ideal.)
-Sample playback patches that dont have ability to sample from inputs. This is a biggie.
-Some patches that would clearly benefit from some kind of sequencer/arpeggio but don’t have one.
-Monitor level for inputs (this should be on every patch as standard imo or in global settings. If only to accommodate setups that have another instrument running in to the organelle).

Soon as I learn PD, adding those things to all my favourite patches that are missing them will probably be first thing I approach.

2 Likes

There’s another super-useful addition I was thinking of the other day. (I’ll try to describe this clearly):

As-is, the second time you hit a key (after adding a new note the first time you hit it), you erase/undo the note. What if it took a long-press to do that? Then we could use a second (or third, fourth, etc) key press to add more notes of the same voice. As a result, you could make rhythms that do more than just repeat every x 16th notes. For example, you could set the kick to play 8th notes, and trigger it on the “1,” repeating every bar. Then you could hit the same key again on the “2-and” and get a second kick hit there - creating a more complex repeating pattern. This would make the polybeats-style sequencer much more powerful…but I’m not sure if the “long-press” idea is possible.

1 Like

Long press for a function is definitely a thing that works. I’ve wondered about this too (and others). I’m not sure how the sequencer works as I don’t think it has any kind of graphical element to it in the patch and I can’t make head or tail of PD diagrams most of the time, not sure if it’s possible without major upheaval but it would be super cool.

I dug into the PD world last night to try and figure out the save option, and I’m super frustrated.
I can’t find any simple way to add it. It’s extremely overwhelming
I can’t seem to get much help from anyone who knows PD, i get the runaround

i told you what you need to do Bassick, i don’t think i gave you the runaround.
there’s plenty of save functions already in C&G patches from what i reckon
I have beginnings of save functions in my recent patch, you can look at that one.

cheers~

If you want to start adding complicated stuff to patches you have to come to terms with the fact that you will probably have to learn it yourself slowly bit by bit. Just like guitar or any other thing which requires skill -the basics can be really fun and so can the complicated stuff. Start with basic stuff because it’s not going to come straight away. I’m a pd noob too. If you wanted to save in this patch you would need to understand how the patch is working at the moment. I think each key(sampler voice) has it’s own timed repeats going on, so if you double click on one of the sampler_voice1, sampler voice 2’s etc in main.pd you may get some clues. Not sure how you’d set this up but it seems like it could be done but would take ages. The thing i love about polybeats is a can just mash the keypad and wiggle knob1 and cool stuff inevitably comes out -so I’m all good for saving personally.

1 Like

Totally.
I should be more specific too.
I want to be able to save and name the pattern.
I’m gonna keep lookin into it.
It would be so perfect to recall specific poly patterns.

2 Likes

I’m on the same boat. saving the beats in the patch would be just amazing! but i can see no light… seems that modifying this patch’s too complicated :frowning:

Partial update on this situation:

Check ChisK’s new updated Pow Pow Polybeats patch, he’s added Visual Keyboard, and also the AUX button starts and stops the same pattern, holding down AUX button clears pattern. This is a really HUGE update to the Polybeats patches. If you’ve created any of your own with new samples, simply delete all the old Organelle files in that particular Polybeats folder ( but not your samples ) and copy over the new data files from the new Pow Pow Polyeats into that folder. You’ll now have the updated version.

https://patchstorage.com/pow-pow-polybeats-vis/

Thanks Chris!!!

2 Likes