Saturday 30 November 2019

Free Quad Modulated Probability MaxForLive plug-in for Ableton Live

Okay, three closely related releases in a few days is unusual, even for me, but there's a strong family bond between these three siblings:

1. MIDIprobD4 is the basic 4-channel 'set the probability of 4 drum sounds.
2. MIDIoffGRID4 adds flexible control over time delays.
And now:
3. MIDIprob+D4 allows the probability to be modulated with LFOs.



MIDIprob+D4 adds four Sync/Free LFOs (Nothing clever, just the same 'borrowed from Ableton' design that I've included in most of my old 'classic' plug-ins like Comber) - Hey, this might be a good time to revisit them...) so that the probability can be modulated instead of being fixed. This adds variability to the unpredictability, and so you may need to get familiar with using the basic 'skinny' MIDIprobD4 first, and then go for the 'full-fat' version.

The LFO in Comber...
Extrapolators have probably realised at this point that there's room in this unified scheme for:

4. MIDIoffGRID+4 and I can neither confirm nor deny that this is in development.

MIDIprob+D4's four channels make using my sophisticated 'modulation widget' difficult because of limited space. I have used it in some of my 'Hex' series of effects, and it allows easy control of modulation depth and offset in a single 2D X-Y control instead of two rotary controls.

The 'Modulation Widget' in AUDhexPPD...
MIDIprob+D4 is literally 4 LFOs added to MIDIprobD4, so the things you need to know are:

1.If you set the Probability rotary control (with the triangle) to 100%, then the LFO isn't going to be able to modulate it fully - you can pull it down to 50%, but that's all. Similarly, if the Probability rotary control is set to zero% then you won't be able to LFO modulate it above 50%. For full modulation of Probability, you need to set the rotary control to 50% - where there's a triangle to remind you. And yes, the 'modulation widget' would have made this obvious, but changing the size is tricky...

2. The 'Sync' speeds are locked to Live's transport, and most of them are very fast in comparison to the 'change the probability slowly over several bars' that you are likely to expect. But try the slower speeds (1/1, etc.) and see what happens when you are locked to a single bar, and then see what happens at shorter time intervals. They may be more useful than you think!

3. Yes, the first time you use the 'Free/Sync' toggle switch, strange things happen with the enabling of the graphics. I'm working on this...

4. Left for future additions...

As always, MIDIprob+D4 is free!

Getting MIDIprob+D4

You can get MIDIprob+D4 here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/5851/midiprobplusd4

Here are the instructions for what to do with the .amxd file that you download from MaxforLive.com:

     https://synthesizerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/where-do-i-put-downloaded-amxd.html

(In Live 10, you can also just double-click on the .amxd file, but this puts the device in the same folder as all of the factory devices...)

Oh, yes, and sometimes last-minute fixes do get added, which is why sometimes a blog post is behind the version number of MaxForLive.com...

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then MIDIprob+D4 would probably require four LFOs, and four Random Noise Generators plus a quad MIDI Utility module to do the velocity multiplying, giving a total of about 9 ME (without all the stored memories, of course).

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