Dustcat's development thread

welcome to my dev thread I started programming my own module last week, the Dustcat Sequencer:

you guessed it (or maybe not :sweat_smile:) it is heavily inspired by the Erica Synth Black Sequencer, its going to have a slightly different set of features though, this thread will be used to show my progress, gather idea and feedback :smiley:

the main goal of this sequencer is more or less the same as the black sequencer: almost no menu diving, easy and fast to get something going, but still being able to transform it to a full blown composition

this sequencer has 5 main mode: pattern, song, CV, gate and mute the state of the two data encoders on the left and the 16 step knobs on the right will reflect the mode the sequencer is currently in, in mute mode the track selection switches will change to track mute switches.

right now only 5 values for gates are possible: 0 (off), 25, 50, 75, 99 and tie (TI)

the length selection mode is not a primary mode like CV, gate, etc so when length mode is activated the step knobs will still change the corresponding step note, octave or gate

shift is also a switch that will change what the step knobs do for instance in CV mode, it allows you to change the octave: no shift = note, shift = octave

the mute leds are only used to show the mute status of the tracks

the play step plays the current step, the only way to move the playing step is to send a clock (but manual clock, reset and run button are going to be added before the first release), I might use a shift + play step to move the current playing step later

the follow button will make the displayed page change, but that’s a complex feature to implement as current selected page is used a lot in the code

save is going to be changed to OK, will be used to confirm any destructive action that does not use a knob (paste, clear)

the song structure is as follows: a song has 64 patterns and 64 song parts, each song part plays a pattern which can be repeated n times, a pattern has 8 track, each track has a length and 64 steps (so that changing length is not destructive)

current Work In Progress before a potential first release:

  • adding song and pattern modes
  • reset and run buttons
  • copy and paste in CV, Gate mode between pages of the same pattern
  • copy and paste a whole pattern to another pattern in pattern mode
  • clear in pattern mode
  • clear in cv mode (set all notes in current page to C4)
  • clear in gates mode (set all gates in current page to 50%)
  • showing current step indicator in the textbox in CV and Gate mode
  • current step number in CV and Gate

Features in further releases:

  • play step and go to next step
  • output songpart, repeats left and playing pattern to CV
  • per step mute on/off for all 8 tracks

Feature ideas:

  • external clock input per track
  • scales
  • 1 mod output per track with lfo, adsr, trigger (I don’t know if I’ll ever have the motivation to do that one)

let me know what you all think about this project !

3 Likes

this looks promising,
I’d like to test it asap,
let me know if you want beta testers (I’m on Win10)

I would love to test too, on Mac here. Can build from source too.

@rsmus7 @pgatt thank you, as soon as I have a working pattern and song mode I’ll make the git repository available (and create a release for those who want to test without building from source)

Hello, some news

I’m rewriting most of my code because it was garbage (not even following the basic SOLID principles). finishing a testable version is taking a lot more time than I though because I kinda forgot how I hate C++ with every fiber of my body, motivation to work on pet projects is already scarse so this doesn’t help but still, I am working on it and don’t plan to give up on this project.

some good news though: pattern and song mode is more or less done (I started the rewrite just before testing song mode), data persistence works

2 Likes

Looks great; looking forward to giving it a whirl.

i didn’t read everything you posted but it’d probably be nice to include an eoc output to sync with other sequencers.

1 Like