Generative Patching Guide

Explore the mysterious sonic landscape of generative music with Rob Redman

Generative music means many things to many people, which makes it both exciting to explore, while also making it harder to cover a lot of ground in the limited space that we have here. That said, we’ll try to make this less about genre and more about exploring the tools and techniques you can use to set up your own generative patches.

Before any of that though, let’s take a look at what generative music is. There are some people out there, including some musicians, who look down on it as being somehow inhuman and therefore not really musical. We’d argue against that however, as what makes it musical is the very human interaction with the patch. We would compare it to CGI. Yes a computer is used to render final output but it’s the artist that defines that output, and it’s their artistry and personality used to make the all important choices, allowing the hardware to act and create based on those choices.

In music it’s exactly the same. We, as musicians, create patches, with timbral options, frequency decisions, LFO rates, envelope shapes and effects. We decide what voltages, from what sources, are quantised and then we define the constraints of those quantisations, from scale to octave range, and so on.

With those thoughts in mind, over the next few pages we’ll introduce you to some of the tools you can use to create your own music, along with some ideas of how to patch them together, allowing you control over your creation, where you could dive in, twiddling knobs and hitting buttons, maybe even using a MIDI controller (yes, they can be part of generative music), or you can set up a patch then sit back and let the music wash over you, as it evolves over time.

We’ll attempt to keep this guide fairly simple, so as to allow you to focus more on the individual task than on a complex total piece of music. The idea here really is that you can master the techniques explained to take on your own journey, having a better understanding of how your modules can interact.