Gridlab Strum
I’ve spent a good deal of time playing touchstyle stringed instruments like the Chapman Stick and Warr Guitar, and I found the geometry of the chord patterns really appealing. A standard guitar tuning has that weird B string to get around, but a strict fourths arrangement makes chord patterns transposable without alternation not only up and down the neck but also across strings.
One of the first applications I made for the monome back in 2007 was called ‘fourths’ that mapped MIDI pitches to the grid button arrangement.
Polygomé also has roots from fourths. However, when I made the poly version of gomé, I added a modal quantizer which made transposing the geometric patterns more musical, but suppressed some of the inherent beauty of the strict fourths arrangement.
Gridlab Strum returns to tuning in fourths. Strum presents an eight string guitar, and you can set what note the lowest open string is set to. Varibrightness allows visualization of the chromatic scale. Moving left to right increases chromatically and moving up the grid moves in fourths.
Gridlab Strum is designed to be used with a 128 or 256 size monome grid and a monome arc. You could use Strum if you just have a 256 or if you just have a 128 or arc, but the most flexible operation comes from a 256 + arc combo.
The top eight rows of the grid visualize the eight strings of the instrument. The bottom half used on the 256 is optional, but includes the shape transposition keys, the auto strum keys, velocity, duration, pattern and arpeggio selection.
The primary function of the arc is to articulate the strum. There are 16 strum arpeggio patterns. Actually, 64 patterns arranged in four banks. The arpeggio pattern can be of an arbitrary length and is completely programmable with a list of integers. 0 is the top string and 7 is the bottom string. A pattern of 7 2 1 0 2 1 0 would first set the lowest string in motion, then arpeggiate the top three strings.
Each string has a lit key that indicates the fretted note. Like a guitar, some strings can be muted. 64 patterns of fretted notes can be memorized and recalled. The pattern can be recalled using an arc encoder or the bottom half of a 256 grid. There are a variety of algorithms that attempt to map an arpeggio pattern to the lit keys. A pattern can be edited in real time on the grid, but recalling fretted notes and arpeggio patterns is a fun way to interact with Gridlab Strum.
