Sequencer "Chance" weird behavior

[Danny Wyatt]

I noticed that the "Chance" feature is a bit weird, because if I have 16 steps and my project's loop/cycle is also 16 steps, the Chance doesn't really do anything to the steps. It picks a pattern and sticks to it. If I then change my loop/cycle to 32 beats (2 bars) instead, then the second half seems to apply a randomization. The same if I keep extending the pattern region.

I can see how this can be useful in certain situations where we like a random generator pattern and we want to keep it, but is there a way to change this? Otherwise it's pretty much the same as just randomizing the steps on/off. I'm not seeing any real benefit in using it. Can someone show me something I'm not aware of that Chance can do uniquely (if any)?

[des99]

Yes, there is has been lots of threads on this since the introduction of the step sequencer, if you want to see the previous disucssion around this. It's less than intuitive on first glance, because you'd think it would randomise those steps on each iteration of the loop, but that's not how it's implemented for a particular reason.

Basically, the chance parameter is *rolled* once to generate the steps, and that's what will play continuously, until you "roll" again by changing the chance values.

[David Nahmani]

I agree that the way it's implemented isn't intuitively the behavior I would have expected.  

[Danny Wyatt]

Yeah, because as I mentioned, the way it is now is no different from randomizing the steps themselves. The only "benefit" (kinda) is that the Chance could act like a "lock" feature for individual steps. So if I have this

and all I want is to randomize the last 8 steps, I can just go ahead and manually randomize the Chance on all of them, by clicking and dragging with the mouse.

Other than that, it seems to work "backwards" to what people expect. I have other plugins where the Chance is just that: on every iteration of the loop, it plays a different thing.

At the same time, it's weird that if the cycle is the same length as the sequence, it plays the same thing, but if you extend the pattern and the cycle to 32 beats, then the "second" time it plays, it now plays something different.

Edited January 4, 2023 by Danny Wyatt

[eclipxe]

Randomizing the steps themselves doesn’t let you choose where you want steps. Chance gives you control over where you might want a step or not. It’s brilliant. I love it.