Figure Ducking

There's a natural limit to how many figure segments you can reasonably layer on top of each other. The human hand only has five fingers. Human listeners can only hear so many voices at once. There are only so many notes in a chord. At some point, the timbres become muddled.

Ducking is a tool that makes individual segments stand out while other segments are muted. It is most useful on a separate track that goes to the same instrument. For example, you can add an extra track of licks, syncopations, breaks and other variations and run it in parallel with a more repetitive phrase (with a different loop length). Each time a variation on this extra track kicks in, the segments on the other track are muted. Instead of layering multiple phrases, they give way to each other.

Here's an example for piano.

The segments of the repetitive phrase were drawn by hand (bottom track). Their velocities were taken from another phrase in a library, simply by dropping the Velocity parameter. 

The other track (top) contains triplets that loop at an odd number of measures. The ducking option is enabled for them. Every time a triplet segment kicks in, the other track is muted, making the triplets stand out as a melodic bridge that connects them.

This small arrangement is based on the principle outlined above. Plus a little manual editing. Harmony was generated by a factory in the Example Harmony library ("Slow Counter Moves"). Some variation was added to the triplets using the Variation parameter (double/half speed, upside/down, reverse, and such).

The resulting arrangement delivers lots of variations and human feel with minimal effort on your part.

You can look into it yourself. The file is attached below.