Dedicating the whole kit to the same sound in Ephemere can be a great way to add subtle variations to a repetitive pattern.
Considering a pattern like the one pictured below :
- C3 is a kick drum sound
- D3 and D#3 are snare drum sounds
We want to use the same sound for the two snares. If we are using a preset, we can simply select the same preset on both channels. But if the preset has been tweaked and not saved we will have to manually adjust everything. Fortunately we have the option to use the copy and paste functions located in the functions zone below the mixer.
After selecting the third track in Ephemere (D3), we click on Copy, then select the fourth track (D#3) and click on Paste. Now the two notes play the same sound.
We can turn the last snare hit of the pattern into a ghost note by lowering its level and adding a small attack to its amplitude envelope.
So now we have two copies of the same sound with a slight difference but the same pattern keeps looping without any variations. What we can do is make the ghost note “optional” : here we will take advantage of the Trigger Probability control found in the Out module.
If we set the Trig Prob knob halfway, the ghost note will randomly be triggered with a probability of about 50%.
Another easy trick is to duplicate a hi-hat sound and set the copy to have a low trigger probability as well as a different amplitude envelope decay time.
Starting with version 1.1, Ephemere offers an option to clone the same sound to all the channels. This option is located in the configuration menu which you can access by clicking on the gear icon at the bottom of the interface.
To use it, we select the part we want to duplicate and then click on that option in the menu. This will fill all the channels with the same settings as the selected one. Now you can tweak various settings on each channel (and especially the random ranges) and occasionally replace occurrences of the base sound in your project by different notes to create some variations.