I’ve created a pattern for the 201 Pocket Piano inspired by Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” and Pd for Airports.
I’ve had a lot of fun with this, and I hope some others do, too. Of course, do let me know if you encounter any problems.
Hold down a note. It will be recorded to a “tape” loop of somewhere between 4 and 7 times its length, and continue looping. Hold down another note. It will be recorded to another tape loop, and also continue looping.
You can have up to six tapes in total. Additional notes will replace earlier ones with new tapes.
You can stop a single tape by quickly pressing the note associated with that tape. You can stop all tapes by quickly pressing and releasing any two notes together (they don’t have to be associated with any tapes).
You can download Airport pattern at Patch Storage, and if you’re interested the source code is available, too.
Here’s a video showing how to use it:
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Ohhh this so cool. Just played around a bit with it and I love what it can do already. Already into the PP as a kind of buddha box, this is perfect for setting up some background loops for doing other things 
As a bonus, i like how the loops keep going when you switch to other patterns. Kind of an endless loop, no need to use the recorder - recorder can then be used for another layer. Very cool. (The loop is so endless that sometimes I couldn’t make it stop whatever i tried, but maybe i need to practice the double press technique.)
Thanks!!
Hello, @hallogallo. Thank you for the kind words. Yes, I also find it’s good for just setting up some nice sounds and then doing something else.
Thank you, also, for the suspected bug report. I’ve found something similar, but it happens so rarely for me (I guess maybe one time in 20 or 30, and never when I’m formally testing it) that I’ve never been sure if it’s due to something else I’ve been doing, such as switching to other patterns. I’ll take another look at the code, but without some kind of reliable way to reproduce this it will be hard to make progress.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to change the length of time you need to “quick press” keys, you can change the values in note-tracker.pd > pd check-quick-click-time. You’ll see there are two places to change - both labelled - from the current 150ms.
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There’s new version now (v1.7) available on Patch Storage. I’m hopeful this will fix the “can’t stop the tapes” problem reported above. Please let me know how you get on.
More detail: Although I couldn’t reliably reproduce the problem above, I was able to reproduce a different problem in which the pattern clearly didn’t interact well with some synths. Specifically, it was possible to create a key combination that would produce a note-off followed by another note-off, and some synths didn’t respond well to this - notable Red Mode, Red Ranger and Hammoth. There is now a step that prevents repeated note-offs (and repeated note-ons).
So, that doesn’t obviously fix the problem reported above, but some fairly abusive testing with some previously bug-revealing synths has yielded reliably positive results.
Additionally I’ve increased the “quick click” time to 200ms, which gives the user a better chance of getting what they want from these key presses.
