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As a musician I'm surprised how much I like the sound of placing beats in a practically random way

https://apps.musedlab.org/groovepizza/?museid=xFlGGuYki&

Wish there was a "randomize" button that would let me input a probability that any given beat should be present and then randomly decide on/off for every node, I feel like that could be an interesting way to explore beatspace.

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Western music (for want of a better term) is so deeply rooted in even 16th notes that almost anything sounds acceptable. I think being limited to 3 curated instruments per pattern helps a lot too.

It’s not just the 16th notes, but that there’s 16 of them. 16/16, or 4/4 if you will. And the adoption of the tresillo (meaning “triplet”, but it’s 3+3+2) and the many variations you can do to it, it’s hard to make 4/4 sound “odd”. It’s possible to do (such as by changing the snare and kick drums to not be “correct”), but popular music tends to avoid that.

If I’m understanding your request, Ableton Live will do that for you. You can set probability that it will choose a given beat pattern and now with their latest version you can also set the probability that an individual note will trigger.

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