Sunday 5 April 2020

Three Mappable outputs of controllable Random-ness in Max For Live for Ableton Live

Comments are always interesting - once you've filtered the spam and adverts out, of course! So when blog reader hems reminded me in a comment that having just one mappable output in RandomA was quite limiting, it nudged me into a new variant of MIDIrandomA...


MIDIrandomABC has three separate mappable outputs that can each be assigned to any of the three built-in types of randomness: called A, B, and C for brevity. So you can now control three parameters in Ableton Live with the same value, or an inverted version, or a scaled and offset version, etc. This enables lots more control over what you randomise and how!


One application that I've been playing with (I've watched too much Ricky Tinez videos on YouTube) is to control the delay time for left and right channels separately in the stock Ableton Live 'Delay' plug-in (other delays are available) as well as the feedback amount. Using the 'Any Note' mode, then the random vlues change for each note event in a clip, and so you get 'per note' changes to delay times and feedback. This sounds really rather nice - the sort of variability that tends to be more associated with modulars than DAWs... I can see that I will have to do a SoundCloud track and YouTube video when I have a moment...

Getting MIDIrandomABCmr02

You can get MIDIrandomABCmr02 here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6110/midirandomabcmr02

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 implementing MIDIrandomABCmr02 requires some quite sophisticated processing of a random noise source, so it probably isn't straightforward to do from off-the-shelf analogue modules, and is probably easier to do digitally. Assuming that a couple of maths/data processing modules can do the required computation, then there's one noise generator, two processing modules, some triggering logic, an LFO for the free-running version, and a sequencer for parameter storage, giving an ME of 6 or 7!

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