Free random velocity repeated notes without using MaxForLive!

In the run up to Christmas, I have been known to release something seasonal, and this has usually been in MaxForLive... This year, in a break from that tradition, I'm releasing something that any Ableton Live user can use! Now I have done non-MaxForLive things before (the Quick Arranger 01 Rack was popular and is still downloadable), so until I gather them together and do a 'recap summary' like I did ages ago for my audio effects, then they will remain in that special 'He doesn't do these very often...' bubble universe reserved for such rarities.

I've allowed myself to break my naming rules, since this is NOT a MaxForLive device, and so I proudly present:

Random Velocity Repeater (RVR) - a MIDI Effect rack for Ableton Live

The left-hand 'control panel' part of the RVR rack...

The Random Velocity Repeater Rack for Ableton Live is built from a MIDI Rack and two standard 'factory' MIDI effects, and so should work in any of the intro/standard/suite variants of Ableton Live 10 (I haven't tested it in Live 9...). It has four channels (red, yellow, green, and blue), each of which processes a single specific MIDI note number. It uses the 'Velocity' MIDI Effect to produce random MIDI Velocities for notes, and the 'Apreggiator' MIDI Effect to repeat notes. Any note events that are processed will have their MIDI velocity values changed, maybe even to zero (and thus turning the MIDI message into a Note Off equivalent) - this is because of two vitally important considerations:

1. My rule of thumb has long been: never repeat a note with the same length, velocity...
2. Random velocities sound cool on repeated notes!
3. Sometimes missing notes are good too! (As well as the third point in a list of two!)

To save you the effort of producing your own RVR Rack, it will be available to download from the Interweb. It will not be available from MaxForLive.com, much as I wish it was possible - and I'm not going to make a MaxForLive version - one of my other rules is that I don't normally make MaxForLive devices that are relatively straight-forward to produce using keyboard shortcuts or standard devices in Racks, unless there's a reasonably good excuse for doing it: simpler UI, less mouse clicks and various other justifications are all acceptable.

As always, in this blog post I'm going to try to provide some basic background information of how my software works. You can now skip to the 'Using it' and then the 'Download' sections if you don't want to grow your own version!

There is also now a YouTube video, which contains several audio examples.

Making it

If you haven't ventured into making Audio (Effects), Instrument, or MIDI Racks, then you may need to read the Ableton Manual first before proceeding, because not everything is obvious. The first thing to do is to create the 'splitter' that extracts out the four notes that will be processed using four separate channels, and a fifth 'Thru' channel that does nothing. To create the first processing channel you drag the 'Arpeggiator' MIDI Effect from the 'MIDI Effects' category in the Browser on the left hand side of Ableton's screen into the gap on the right after the bit that says 'Drag MIDI Effects Here'. (I said it was best to read the manual!) Then drag the 'Velocity' MIDI Effect to the right of it. Then go to the 'Key' view and set the upper and lower limits to a single note by dragging the left and right sides of the green bar left or right as appropriate. Then name the channel - I called it 'Note 1' because it is the first note processing channel. Then 'Duplicate' it three times, using the pop-up menu, and rename them to Note 2, Note 3, and Note 4. Finally, drag and drop the 'Pitch' MIDI Effect, and name it 'Thru' - making sure that for this fifth 'Thru' channel you set the key range to everything - drag the ends of the bar all the way to the left and right so the bar is right across the whole MIDI note number range.

The left hand 'Macro' control panel, plus the 'Drop MIDI Effects Here' middle bit, and the start of the right-hand 'Key' mapping panel...

The four duplicated copies of the Arpeggiator and Velocity channels, which are called Note 1-4, will all be mapped to the same note number, so you need to change them to four different notes (and this is a good time to think about a good colour scheme - mine is a bit rainbow-like...

What the key mapping panel should look approximately like for typical drum note numbers...

The graphics in the key mapping panel are quite small, so here's a close-up of the important bit where the four channels are mapped to four drum notes (shown as red on the keyboard):

When MIDI notes are received by the MIDI Effect rack, the keyboard highlights the appropriate keys on the keyboard graphic in red. Here, three notes (36, 37 and 42) are highlighted, and 38 is not. The 'bar for the Note 1-4 channels should only be 1 note wide, as shown here.

All you need to do is set the narrow bars so that they are underneath the note numbers which correspond to the drum sounds that you want to process. I set the four channels to MIDI note numbers in this way:

42 Closed Hi-Hat

38 Snare

37 Rim shot

36 Kick drum

The velocities of the drums in this pattern clip are not very imaginative! (But remember that they will be randomised...)

The settings of the Arpeggiator and Velocity MIDI Effects are shown here:

The Arpeggiator MIDI Effect is set so that itjust repeats the incoming note several times at a particular rate. The number of repeats and how quickly they repeat can both be set. You can see two small green dots on each of the rotary controls that indicates that I have already mapped these rotary controls to the Macro Controls in the left-hand control panel. To do this, you need to go into 'Map' mode by pressing the 'Map' button (various bits of the UI will go green-tinged at this point) and selecting the appropriate Macro rotary control and the control that you want to map to it. Full details are in the manual! You need to do this mapping process twice for each of the channels: once for the 'Repeats' control, and once for the 'Rate' control, making 8 mappings in total.

The Velocity MIDI Effect does quite a lot of processing of the incoming MIDI. The 'Random' rotary control is set to maximum (64) and the 'Out Hi' rotary control is set to its middle position (63) so that the output velocities will hit the maximum of 127 and all the input velocities will be scaled so that they contribute half their value to the output. So half of the output velocity will be the input, whilst the other half will be random. The 'Out Low' rotary control is set to 0 so that it can produce Note Off messages - you will need to click on the number below the rotary control to change it from the default value of 1. Finally, the 'Lowest' number box can be changed to 0 if you wish. This changes the probabiliity of the output notes slightly - as you can see in the screenshots, I didn't do this, but if you wish to make your own custom version... You could also customise the 'Comp' compression setting as well if you want to compress or expand the dynamic range of the MIDI velocities.

For the 'Thru' channel, you don't need to do anything, and the Thru channel will do that as well!

Using it

Here's the MIDI Effect Rack expanded out to show everything, then the Drum Instrument that makes the drum sounds. In normal use, you would probably only have the left hand 'Control Panel' section of the MIDI Effect rack visible - so just the Macro Controls would be visible:

After the Drum Instrument, you can add any Audio Effects that you want. I used a Reverb Effect. But before the Reverb I added a Limiter, because lots of repeated notes played quickly can be louder than a single instance of the note!

Here's a Limiter Effect before the Reverb

For each note number channel, you need to set a Clip Envelope and map that to the appropriate Macro Control in the left-hand control panel. If you haven't done this before, then you should read the Ableton Live manual because I'm not going to give full and complete details of every mouse-click... 

For Note 1, the Kick drum, the repeats are mapped to a clip envelope that rises from 1 to 8...

This is what the clip envelope looks like... The clip envelope starts at 1 on the left, and rises to 8 on the right hand side.

This means that at the start of the bar, the first Kick drum will be repeated once, the second kick will be repeated twice, the third 4 times and the fourth 6 times. The rate at which the repeats happen is set by the 'Synced Rate' rotary Macro control, which is set to 1/128th note. This is very fast repetition, and turns the Kick drum sounds to  sound more like a pitched note. ( - this is a form of sound synthesis called FOF, and you might be interested in looking up what it means and how it works...)

A slightly more conventional use would be to have a slower repeat rate, and this gives drum sounds where you can actually hear the individual repeats! Here's an example using a Rim Shot drum sound:

The Rim Shot drum sound used with Repeats plus variable Rate - it sounds quite a lot like a Guiro at times...

The clip envelope selection doesn't number the 'Repeat' or 'Rate' parameters, so you have to go by the position: top is Red (1), then Yellow (2), then Green (3), then Blue (4).  This clip envelope is for the Rate at which the notes are repeated.

The Rate starts out slow, speeds up in the middle of the bar, and then slows down again. Unfortunately, I didn't invert the Rate mapping, so faster speeds of repeat are at the bottom, and slower are as you move upwards. You could make your home-grown version do it correctly, of course!

Tints and Hips

Also known as Hints and Tips, but it probably got your attention!

SPARING Ok, so there are four channels to play with, and they are colour-coded in bright colours - this does not mean that you need to use all four channels every time! Sometimes just a single note in a single bar is all you need, or a single note repeated for every chorus. And yes, there are some genres of music where repeating it several times every bar is currently fashionable. But all four channels, all the time, is probably over-kill and may make your music sound ever-so-slightly cliched. 

SUBTLE Clip envelopes can wazz parameters from min to max very quickly, and then wang them back again just as fast. This does not mean that huge variations in the number of repeats, or the rate of those repeats, will sound better - sometimes less is more. Having said that, completely 'way-over-the-top' rate and repeat settings with a Rim Shot sound can occasionally sound just like a Guiro! 

CONFIDENCE Once you have tweaked the Repeats and adjusted the descent of the Rate control so that the Kick drum sounds like an 'FOF' cross between a drum and a monosynth, then you might be tempted to try and hide it deep in the mix. Based on what I hear these days from 'popular beat combos', then you may as well just have the confidence to put your carefully honed special sound effect loud, front and centre. 

CONFLICT When two or more tips contradict each other, as in SPARING, SUBTLE and CONFIDENCE, then just do whatever you want. If you have the Spinal Tap extension fitted to your DAW, then simply turn up all the controls to 11.  

REPETITION I mentioned it earlier, and it bears repeating: Fast repetitions of the same drum sound (particularly if your drum sounds are polyphonic) can be louder than a single instance of the same sound. A Limiter might be useful to keep things under control...

YouTube video!

I have struggled putting videos into blog pages successfully, so I'm going to turn all of this blog post into a YouTube video, so that you will be able to see these happening in a full audio-visual experience!

The video link is here...

Getting the Random Velocity Repeater Rack

You can get the Random Velocity Repeater Rack here:

       https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H6U6k2FVQy_n5gekCm5prVwsp488done/view?usp=sharing

You just need to drop the .adg file onto Live's screen and it should appear in the MIDI Effects folder.

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then the Random Velocity Repeater Rack would probably require four Random Noise Generators plus a quad MIDI Utility module to do the velocity multiplying, plus 4 LFOs to do the repeats, and a final quad MIDI Utility to create the repeated notes, giving a total of about 10 ME (without all the stored memories, of course).

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

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).

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

Redundant MIDI Note On Messages Used to Set the Probability of a Drum Event

The Ableton Live piano roll display for MIDI Events is interesting, in many ways. As someone who has been using hardware sequencers since the 1970s (ARP's model 1601 Sequencer, for example, or the Roland...,), and software sequencers since the 1980s (The UMI-2B/4M on the BBC B, for example... http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/umi-4m-midi-composition-system/3975 from September 1988, or Dr.T's on the Atari...), then I have seen and used a lot of ways of representing and controlling musical data. Ableton's piano roll is quick and easy for some tasks, but I have always liked a list-based view for adding things like program changes, or tweaking the order of 'simultaneous' events that are serialised by MIDI transmission.

(Picture from Reverb.com, where you may be lucky enough to find and purchase classic devices like this one!)

However, most seriously of all, it has always been my exposure to Intelligent Music's RealTime sequencer that has had the most profound effect on me (with John Hollis's Trackman just behind it...). RealTime was arguably one of the first sequencers that showed the road away from tape recorder emulations and towards modern DAWs (When I reviewed it, I didn't return it: I bought it! http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/realtime-intelligent-sequencer/5624 ). And one of the killer features for me was the randomisation control - a little toggle box with a random pattern inside it that turned boring hi-hat lines into much more interesting decoration, and which sounded much less like a robot playing. Some things get under your skin and into your head, and you may have noticed that many of my MaxForLive devices (and more) have a significant bias towards using probability as a control source.

Which is where Ableton's piano roll comes in. Power users probably already know about the 'select a note, press the '0' (zero) button' shortcut that disables or enables notes (it is in the pop-up menu for the piano roll), but I've always wanted a Modifier key version (Shift-Zero, or Control-Zero, or something else, that doesn't disable a note, but sets the probability of it happening. Having 'greyed out' disabled notes is okay, but I would like more!

Now, it is possible to make a MIDI Effect Rack that extracts a single MIDI note and uses MIDI velocity processing or the Arpeggiator to provide control over the probability of a note, but it is pretty awkward, and not very elegant. All of which sounds like a cue for a simple, neat MaxForLive MIDI Effect that lets you control the probability of notes happening.

MIDIprobD4 does exactly that - for four notes simultaneously (It is a 'quad' or four-channel device...). The D indicates that its primary intended use is for drum sounds - you put it just in front of the Drum Rack. I use it to make hi-hats less robotic, to make snares unpredictable... You get the idea. If I'm bored, then I assign all four channels to kick, snare, closed and open hi-hat, and fill the Clip piano Roll with drum notes, and it produces oodles of random drum patterns. In a world currently overflowing with Black Friday deals (and what are the from/to dates for that?) then the deal is my standard one - it is FREE and will remain so (unless something extraordinary happens!).

Redundant MIDI Note Offs

MIDI has some interesting back alleys. In the classic reference specification, Complete_MIDI_96-1-3.pdf', on Page 10. In the 'Note-Off' section, it says that a Note On message with a zero velocity is roughly equivalent to a Note Off message.

( For more MIDI documentation, please visit: https://www.midi.org/specifications ) 

Now for any MIDI device that is velocity sensitive, a velocity value of 1 (one up from zero) is going to tend to be quite low in volume - maybe only fractionally just above no sound at all. The opposite value, 127, is maximum volume, of course, and so in many cases, zero and 1 sound pretty similar - one is totally quiet, the other is as quiet as it can be without not playing at all. There's one other interesting feature of drums - they are almost always velocity-sensitive. Further, on page A-4 in the 'Assignment of Note On/Off Commands' section, it says that 'Since there is no harm or negative side effect in sending redundant Note Off messages then this is the recommended practice' when talking about ensuring that Note Ons and Note Offs are always paired together, eventually.

The 'Velocity of zero is a Note Off' feature and the 'Redundant Note Offs are ok' feature are the mechanisms that I exploited to control the probability of MIDI note events in MIDIprobD4. Yes, I could have produced a complex device that keeps track of Note On messages and waits for the corresponding Note Off messages, and controls the probability of a note happening by removing the complete pair of messages, but it is far easier to just change the velocity of a Note On message to zero - which changes it to a Note Off, and redundant Note Offs are ok. So the MIDI processing is vry simple - just a multiplier for the velocity value of zero or 1. With a multiplier of 1, then the velocity of the note is unchanged: 1 x any value from 1 to 127 is the value. But with a multiplier of zero, then any value from 1 to 127 is changed to zero, which is the equivalent of a Note Off message, and it is okay to send redundant Note Off messages!

The Max code is shown above. This is inside a patcher that handles the velocity, and so outside this is more code that separates the MIDI messages into Note Number and Velocity streams, and so this is just the velocity stream processing. The yellow number box is a buffer so that the time it takes for the 'Random' object to generate a random number doesn't affect the processing time of this patcher - the previous value is available immediately from the number box. The output of the '<=' object is either zero or 1, and this drives the multiplier. The Probability control is a 0-100 rotary percentage control. I have to confess that whilst this approach follows the MIDI Specification, the actual device isn't perfect (but then, many of my devices have quirks...) and so sometimes it shows a note with a high probability that doesn't actually make any sound. I have spent quite a while trying to find out what the problem is, but haven't been able to discover the cause. Perhaps a reader of this blog may be able to enlighten me?

Anyway, MIDIprobD4 has simple controls. From left to right the first rotary control in each of the four channels is the MIDI note selector (0-127, although most drum notes are typically going to be 36-60ish), then some memory slots/squares (shift-click to save, click to recall), then an indicator blinker to show that a note event has been received, then the rotary Probability Percentage control, and finally a second indicator blinker to show that an note event has been transmitted to the output. Minimalistic, although I'm sure it could be made even smaller...

And that's it. Put MIDIprobD4 just before your Drum Rack and you have control over the probability of four of the drum sounds. Enjoy!

Links from this blog post:

UMI-2B/4M on the BBC B (from muzines.co.uk)
ARP model 1601 Sequencer from Reverb.com
RealTime sequencer review (from muzines.co.uk)
MIDI Documentation

And a special mention for a wonderful repository of music magazines from what now seems to have been a 'golden age':

Mu:zines - an amazing resource!

Getting MIDIprobD4

You can get MIDIprobD4 here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/5844/midiprobd4

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 MIDIprobD4 would probably require four Random Noise Generators plus a quad MIDI Utility module to do the velocity multiplying, giving a total of about 5 ME (without all the stored memories, of course).

If you find my writing helpful, informative or entertaining, then please consider visiting this link:

Buy me a coffee

Different every time - changing parameters with M4L in Ableton Live

I've always worked according to the principle of 'Never the same thing twice'. Whilst most important for things like drums, I try to apply it to most sounds - although I also like flams, which kind of goes completely against the principle! Maybe 'Be inconsistent' is a better way of putting it? (Just to be consistent, I have added in the updates made to MIDIdifferentONE version 0.02 into this blog...)

In Ableton Live, there's an obvious way to control the parameters that are one major way of changing sounds on the fly: the 'Clip Envelopes'. The name is slightly misleading, because clip envelopes are just a way to draw parameter values onto the piano roll. Anyway, the clip envelopes are normally hidden by default, and you need to click on the 'E' inside a round button to open up the overlay in the piano roll pane. Selecting a device and a parameter from the two pop-up menus then lets you draw lines and curves either with a rather blocky pencil tool ('Steps') or with a 'lines and breakpoints' ('Ramps') tool. I prefer the 'lines and breakpoints' approach...

One of the 'classic' parameters that is controlled this way is filter cutoff (with an appropriate level of resonance) and I have spent quite a lot of time zooming out from a clip, setting the cutoff frequency for a bar, then clicking to get a new point and dragging it up and leftwards to get a new parameter level for the next bar, and so on. It requires quite a lot of clicking, but once it is complete, then editing each of the levels is quite quick to adjust. However, if you want to change the timing, for instance, to a change every other bar (or an arbitrary length), then it can require more clicks. There's also another non-obvious thing to consider that requires more clicks - you need to have the parameter set before the fist note on in the bar. This is why the orange clip envelope line is shown in the diagram as changing just before the first note in the next bar - if you don't do this then you hear the note start and then the filter cutoff change, which sounds like a mistake.

What this means is that you start off zoomed out, setting the parameter levels for each bar (or other interval), and then you need to zoom in to each of the ends of the bars where the parameter changes, the nudge the parameter change a little bit earlier in time. Then you zoom back out again. For me, there's a point where repeated mouse clicking gets a bit tedious, and I've never found any keyboard shortcuts for some parts of the clip envelope editing. So setting up several clip envelopes for a few parameters, and then changing the timing, starts to exceed my trigger level, and I stop and go looking for alternatives.

LFOs are the obvious alternative, and I've explored all sorts of variations of Slow Oscillators, including quite a lot of my own MaxForLive devices. The trouble with LFOs is intrinsic: they want to change, slowly; whilst for parameter changes I'm really looking for sudden changes followed by long steady fixed values. Lots of LFOs come with various 'Random' or 'S&H' (Sample and Hold') outputs that do give the stepped change, but then the values aren't under my direct control. Okay, so S&H on a filter cutoff can sound cool, especially a quarter note intervals (of which more later), but when you are controlling a build then you want to be able to set the parameter value for each bar. So LFOs are 'almost' the solution, but what would the ideal look like?

My ideal would have a LFO like 'Rate' control, followed by some way of controlling the parameter setting for each time period - from quarter bars up to every 8 bars or so. Which kind of sounds a bit like a weird step sequencer... but one that that enables each bar (or other interval) to have different parameters!

MIDIdifferentONE

MIDIdifferentONE is a deliberately 'different' step sequencer for parameter values that works a bit like an LFO, except that it is always synced to the sequence timing, and it is optimised for setting parameter values and then replaying them at various rates. Best of all, it always changes the parameter value just before the end of the bar, so you don't get the note followed by the parameter change!

It turns out that the requirement for something to happen 'just before' something else is one of those programming tasks that keeps cropping up again and again in electronic music, and I've struggled many times with getting it to work correctly. So this time, I was determined to spend some time solving the problem, and then some time showing how I came up with my solution. As always with these things, there's probably a much better, cleverer, shorter and neater way to do it, but I will leave that to other programmers!

LFO timing and step sequencer design is all standard 'home territory' for MaxForLive, but the requirements for the timing of the parameter change are more interesting - we need the parameter to change 'just before' the end of the bar (or some other interval). 'Just before' might be loosely defined as something like 'after the last beat, and as late before the end of the bar as we can manage without the parameter change happening in the next bar'. I decided to simplify 'as late as' to mean ' the last 16th note tick before the end of the bar, which is probably going to work with most situations - although if you put very short notes right at the very end of a bar then MIDIdifferentONE might start to change the parameter to the value for the next bar as your last note of the bar plays...

For 16th note quantisation, Live's transport outputs bars as numbers, beats as the numbers 1 to 4, and 'ticks' as the numbers 0, 120, 240 an 360. If you don't quantise the timing, then you get tick numbers like 205.74 and the processing is more complex. For MIDIdiffrentONE, making sure that the parameter changed before the end of the bar was the most important thing, so I kept things simple and applied quantisation, but only to the timing for these parameter changes! So MIDIdifferentONE will not affect the quantisation of any other timing in your music.

The definition of 'after the last beat and when the last tick happens' translates to beat=4 and tick=360, so all that is needed is a bit of Boolean logic in MaxForLive... Now the easiest way to do this kind of goes against the 'visual programming' metaphor that MaxForLive uses, and uses the 'if' object and requires some typing! Suddenly MaxForLive is going a little bit 'programmer'y! What you type in the Max object is something like 'If ($i1=4 and $i2=360) then 1 else 0', which means that when input 1 is equal to 4 (beats) and input 2 is equal to 360 (ticks) then output a '1', otherwise output a '0' (zero). Yep, that's a traditional text programming 'if statement' inside a MaxForLive object. Some of you may need to sit down at this point...

That covers how to make something happen at the end of every bar - whenever the beat=4 and tick=360. Other times like every other bar or every quarter bar just require slightly different 'if' statements and additional processing. I hid the end result inside a patcher box to keep things neat and tidy:

So you can see the 'metro' object that provides timing from the master clock source, a 'transport' object that outputs bars, beats and 'ticks' into those three number boxes, and then the 'before_mr' object that contains all of those hidden-away 'if' statements. The 'switch' object selects the desired timing, and after a special 'counter' object, you can see the top of the 'step sequencer' object.

Inside the 'before_mr' patcher? I'm not one to hide stuff away, so here goes:

If you look across the lower part of the patch, then you should find the 'every bar' output, (fourth from the left) and above that a blink object, some tidying up, and then an object with 'if $i1==4 && $12==360 then 1 else 0' inside it. This is the 'just before the end of the bar' requirement turned into an 'if statement' using MaxForLive terminology - so '&&' means 'AND', and '==' means 'is equal to'. You might like to try and work out how the other outputs are generated as well.

There's a trap with this 'just before' approach, and it happens in the very first step. As always, you should consider the 'edge effects', and this is one case where I didn't think enough about the initial step. The 'before_mr' patcher outputs a 'bang' event just before the end of the set time period: from every 8th bar to every quarter beat. So what happens in the first step? If we take the middle case of 'every bar' then the 'bang' event will not happen until just before the end of that first bar. This means that until that happens the counter is in the 'reset' case, which is a count of zero, so the step sequencer stays on whatever step it was before we started Live's transport running. Only when it gets to just before the end of the bar will a bang event occur, and the counter will increment, and step 1 will begin - almost a whole bar late! What actually need to happen is that the counter needs to be set to step 1 at the beginning of the bar, not just before the end. This can be achieved by using a 'timepoint 1 1 0' object, which produces a bang event when Live's transport starts running, and if this resets the counter, then step 1 starts correctly. This means that the first step is slightly less than a bar long in this case...

That's what is happening inside, now let's look at outside.

Using MIDIdifferentONE

The plug-in has has three sections, and from left to right, these control the setup, the step sequencer, and the value output and mapping. On the left hand side, the top shows the beat indicator and count, where the blinker can also be clicked on to reset the sequencer. Underneath that, the pop-up menu allows selection of the step sequencer rate: from every 8th bar, down to every quarter note (slow to fast, with the fast setting being the 'classic' S&H filter modulation effect). The cluster of thirteen buttons are used to fill the step sequencer, and the 'Random' button generates a different pattern each time. The 'Scramble' button jumbles the sequence of the values, and below it is an 'Undo' button that will restore the last edit you made - it isn't very sophisticated and there's only one level at the moment.

The middle section is the step sequencer. Every fourth step is highlighted in white instead of light purple, and the bar at the top can be used to set the length and looping points. The default is 16 steps from 1 to 16, but you can vary it to anything to 2 steps from 1 to 2, to 16 steps from 1 to 6, and back to 2 steps from 15 to 16. When you stop Live, then the step sequencer area can be edited 'live' using the mouse - just hover the mouse near the top of one of the step 'circles' in the middle 'step' section,  and that value will be displayed. Click and you can change the value of the step. If you move the mouse across the step sequencer area then you can 'draw' in the values very quickly. - the background of each step will go grab as the mouse selects that step...

So the workflow for setting the controlled parameter is now very simple: Stop Live playing, and then you can set the step values as you want with the mouse and they will be saved. Note: If you select one of the preset patterns, then you will lose your edits!

The right hand side shows the output value for each step, as well as a vertical bar indicator. The 'Normal'/'Invert' switch inverts the value, so high values become low and vice-verse. The 'Offset' and 'Depth' controls allow the value to be adjusted to suit the target parameter. Finally, the 'Unmap' button undoes any pre-existing mapping of the value to a parameter inside Live, and the 'Map' button allows you to mp the value to any available parameter inside Live.

Here is the 'classic' LFO S&H filter mod setting, except that it repeats, the steps can be edited, and it can be slowed down to as slow as once every 8 bars. This example is set for every other bar, and so the end effect sounds like a different setting (or different preset) every 2 bars. And switching to quarter beat cliche is just a single pop-up menu selection, whereas you would need to edit the timing of every value in a clip envelope.

Here's the output remapped to an instance of Analog inside Live, where the controlled parameter is the octave for Oscillator 1. The Offset control is set so that the centre position is no stave transposition, whilst the depth is set so that the oscillator goes up and down by one octave. LFO modulation of the octave control with an 'S&H' type of waveform would not give you any way to edit the waveform, but MIDIdifferentONE lets you set when the octave transposition happens.

Something that you may not have tried before is to change the filter type. Doing this every half beat is quite extreme, and the sound of a filter jumping from his-pass to band-pass to low-pass quickly is unusual. Remember that unlike an LFO doing Random or S&H waveforms, you can edit every step of the sequencer, so you can get exactly the results you want for each step.

ONE?

After a long run of 'hex' MaxForLive plug-ins, you might not be surprised by the 'ONE' suffix to the name of this device. I can neither confirm nor deny the future existence of any multi-channel versions of this utility...

Getting MIDIdifferentONE

You can get MIDIdifferentONE on  https://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/5805/mididifferentone-mr

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 the blog post is behind the version number of MaxForLive.com...

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then MIDIdifferentONE 0v01 would probably require an LFO plus a step sequencer, and a Utility module to do the scaling, giving a total of about 3 ME (without all the stored patterns, of course).

And here's a link to click on if you find my writing informative:

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Spectral Hex Ping Pong Delay in MaxForLive for Ableton Live

After playing around with various Ping Pong Delay-like devices for a while, I realised that my 'Hex' template was a good place for experimenting with multiple delays, so I took the internals of the AUDpiPOde device and put it inside the 'hex' device template (six times). The result is AUDhexPPD, where I'm abbreviating ping pong delay to PPD to save characters.

AUDhexPPD

Because AUDhexPPD is another 'wide' device, then here's just the left hand side:

Going across the left to right, the input indicator shows the incoming audio signal (and yes, this does duplicate the tiny meters in-between devices), then the Ping Pong Delay block, with the 'Note value time delay' button grid, followed by the 'Unsync' time tweaker, the 'LR swap' output channel allocator, the 'f' delay freeze button, and the Feedback rotary control (which is individual to each PPD block).

The next block across to the right is the middle block: the three-band 'spectral' filtering, which just gives three outputs via low-pass, high-pass and band-pass filters. Unlike the usual 'crossover' filters that you get in some 'spectral' devices (or loudspeakers, now that I think about it), these filters have a Resonance rotary control, which gives the device the ability to colour the sound, so maybe it is more than just six delays.

Finally, on the right hand side, there is the 'Auto-pan' block, which has an individual meter per audio processing block, the 'X' Active/Muted switch (as per all of the 'hex' devices, and a few others of mine), the new 'Pan Position and LFO Modulation' UI widget that I introduced recently (move the white 'thumb' down and horizontal for pan position, and up for LFO modulation), and finally the LFO Rate rotary control, which goes from very slow to not very quick, but then it is a modulation control and audio rate modulation of pan position is not something I'm a great fan of...

On the far right-hand side, there are the usual memory buttons (Click to recall, Shift-click to save (red when empty, grey when filled)) and the Dry/Wet rotary control, followed by three 'common' controls which affect all of the six audio processing blocks: Feedback, Resonance, and Freeze. These just make it easier to alter all of the six audio processing blocks at once!

As usual in the 'hex' devices, the right hand half of the front panel is mirrored, which looks interesting, and makes it very clear that this is a stereo device. Just repeating things twice can make it look like they are arranged in series... There isn't a perfect solution for this, but this way works for me, and it isn't too hard to flip one half if you need an unmirrored custom device...

MaxForLive

So, what's interesting in the M4L code for this device? As I have mentioned previously, I prefer stereo in and out for my devices, and this is normally done with pairs of mono in and mono out devices where the output can be panned across the stereo image... However, each of the 6 audio processing blocks in AUDhexPPD is a tapped delay with a mono input and stereo outputs, and so instead of having one output that needed to be panned, then I had two - and for a ping pong delay then these two outputs should be in the Left and Right channels (or vice-versa - which is what the 'LR Swap' button does). But with two outputs then I needed two auto-pans, and so the obvious answer was to have two auto-pans in anti-phase, so that when one output was on the Left, then the other would be on the Right. 'Dual anti-phase auto-panning' isn't a very catchy description, so I'm going to call it 'Helicopter' mode, because the two pans circle around each other rather like the blades on a helicopter...

Yes, I could have changed the balance between control values and audio signals in this - so the 'snapshot~' and 'sig~'could have been removed from the panning part, but then I would have had to add them back in to the LFO Depth and LFO Out to get control values. This way works for me...

Alternatively, I could have had two SEPARATE auto-pans for each of the two outputs: one LFO for Left, and another LFO for Right. This would have required a doubling of all of the controls in the centre 'panning' block, and would have made the device even wider! (and more complex to use) I decided to go for the simpler solution and leave the 12 pan LFO version for another time (Maybe in an 'mc' version as a way to explore this new feature of Max 8!)

The Max code just inverts the (0 to 1) control value for the multipliers so that the two inputs are affected in opposite ways. Remember that the audio inputs are called 'L' and 'R' because this is the convention for ping pong delays - the first echo comes from the Left channel, then the next from the Right channel. These are not the main incoming audio channels to the whole device - each audio processing block has a mono input and two 'stereo' outputs. So, for each audio processing block, the two inputs are coming from a tapped delay, and so these input signal will be 'bouncing' back and forth between those inputs, and this auto-panning then adds additional pan control on top of that. If you stop the LFO and fix the pan position to Left or Right, then the result is ordinary ping pong echo - where the repeats 'bounce' between Left and Right.

Note that this is the auto-pan arrangement for just one of the six parts in the Pan block. So if you have just one 'X' highlighted and the rest muted, then that ping pong delay will bounce between the Left and Right output channels, panned according to the pan position and LFO modulation as set in that block. If you have two 'X's highlighted (one in the Left half, and one in the Right half), then you have two ping pong delay in parallel - and so the outputs can bounce between the Left and Right outputs independently. If you have all six blocks active, and use the 'triangle' tweak controls to 'unsync' the time delays, then you start to move away from 'echo' and towards 'reverb'-type sounds. The more asynchronous echoes you have, then the more 'reverb'-like the result will be - which, of course, is exactly how real reverb is produced: lots of echoes with different delay times. You 'could' put several 'AUDhexPPD' devices in series, but it is probably going to take a lot of adjusting to get something even approximately like a conventional reverb sound...

Getting AUDhexPPD

You can get AUDhexPPD on http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/5522/audhexppd

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 the blog post is behind the version number of MaxForLive.com...

RAM and CPU in Live

This MaxForLive device has six tapped delays, so it will use lots of RAM storage and CPU power - but it is worth it, IMHO!

Effects Rack Equivalent in Live

I haven't tried it, but it ought to be possible to get quite a lot of the functionality of AUDhexPPD with an Effects Rack in Ableton Live, although the UI is not going to be as compact, and it might even be possible to implement the spectral crossovers using the band-pass filters inside Delay (or Ping Pong Delay if you aren't using Live 10.1).

What is interesting is that the limitations of building AUDhexPPD inside Live result in something which is a nice, usable effect, but it isn't the same as the MaxForLive version. Anyway, it was a good exercise in translation, and I'm making it available for free. You can download it from here...

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then AUDhexPPD would require two high-pass filters, two low-pass filters, two band-pass filters, six tapped time delays, six LFOs, six panner, some utility switches, and two mixers, giving a total of about 24 ME. It is interesting that this is also a 'wide' device in MaxForLive!

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Ping Pong Delay - Re-imagined differently! (Plus M4L Audio switches)

My first AUDpiPOde (Ping Pong Delay) M4L device had some protracted problems, and hopefully the additional tweaks for version 0.04 should fix them. But in the course of learning more about how the original (and soon to be deprecated) Ableton Live Ping Pong Delay actually worked, I realised that I had re-imagined it along the wrong vector, and that my 'all stereo' approach had too many differences to the original. The band-pass filter also proved to be a significant challenge, and dropping it again restricted the flexibility. (...Now, I'm not the greatest fan of 'muddy' echoes, but they are a defining characteristic of some vintage tape echo units...)

So, here's almost the opposite of AUDpiPOde - it uses a tapped delay line, mixes the channels into a mono signal for the echoes, and puts back the 'far-from-perfect' band-pass filter emulation made up from a high-pass and low-pass filter (and I need to learn more about filters in Max!). It uses a different 'freeze' method (as well as the ones I added), and it provides a 'Thru' button to bypass the filters. I also tweaked the delay routing so that you can have 'Echo in the Left channel first, then the Right channel' or 'Right channel first, then the Left channel' - which is quite striking if you are used to the 'feel' of the original!

And the name? AUDpiPOde-A, of course!

Making audio switches

One of the traps for people who are trying to learn Max are the large variety of switches. There are simple switches, complex matrix switches, routers and the names are sometimes different if audio is being switched. I'm still gathering information for a guide, but in the meantime, here's what I've been doing to build custom audio switches...

LR 'Left first' 'crossover' toggle switch

The 'Echo in the Left channel first, then the Right channel' or 'Right channel first, then the Left channel' switch functionality is a good example. All that needs to happen is that the two outputs from the delay (the middle tap and the end) need to be routed to the Left and Right channels, in the two possible combinations.

This is the output stages of the AUDdiPOde 'Ping Pong Delay' device, with, from top downwards, the feedback rotary control, the 'LR' echo order control, and the Dry/Wet rotary control. For the Feedback control, you can see how the line~ object is fed with pairs of '<new value> 50ms' values for each new line segment, so that the multiplier that does the feedback only gets values that change reliably slowly (each new value takes 50ms to happen) and so the amplitude of the feedback signal doesn't jump suddenly.

Just below the feedback code, the 'LR' box is where the interesting switching takes place. The 'p cross_mr' object has two stereo inputs (from the tap and the final output of the tapped delay line) and two stereo outputs (which go to the Dry/Wet' balance control library object. The 'LR' toggle switch controls the 'p cross_mr' object, and all it does is change between the default 'Left In to Left Out, Right In to Right Out' switch setting to the alternate 'Left In to Right Out, Right In to Left Out' which reverses the channel ordering. So in the default 'Left first' position, the 'LR' switch controls the 'p cross_mr' object so that the tap output of the delay line goes to the Left In of the 'cross' switch and comes out of the Left Out, which means that the tap output is heard in the Left channel first, whilst the final output of the delay is routed to the Right channel and so is heard later. When the 'LR' toggle is in the 'Right first' position, then the 'cross' switch routes the tap output of the delay to the Right channel where it is heard first, and the final delay output is routed to the Left channel, where it is heard later. So the 'cross' switch connections are either straight-through, or crossed-over - hence the name.

I don't think there is a standard MaxForLive switch that does this 'out of the box', so I made the 'cross' switch:

  
There are only two objects used inside the 'cross' switch - gate~ objects, which are just on/off switches for audio signals, and one of those arcane 'not quite obvious' special-purpose modifier objects: '!- 1', which inverts a 0 or 1 control value. So 0 becomes 1, and 1 becomes 0 - it is an 'inverter' for  control values. If you replace the two left-hand gates with through connections (closed switches) then you can see that A goes to X, and B goes to Y. Whereas if you replace the two right-hand gates with throughs then A goes to Y and B goes to X, and so achieves the straight-through or
crossover switching.

In physical hardware, then crossover switches like this are very easy to spot when you look at the rear  wiring of a front panel - the inputs go to the centre common part of the switch, whilst the outputs come from one of the outer pairs, and two wires cross over the outer pairs - so you can see at a glance that it is a crossover switch!

Fade switches

If you just switch from one audio signal to another, then you get sudden changes in the value of the signal, and these can cause clicks in the audio. To avoid this happening, one technique is to 'dip' the audio volume as you do the switching, and then restore it afterwards. This approach is used in AUDpiPOdePLUS, the 'performance-oriented' freeze echo device.

For this technique to work, then a sequence of operations need to happen in the right order, and at the right times. Here's the sequence:

1. The volume is at maximum.
2. trigger for the switching occurs. In the AUDpiPOdePLUS device, this happens when one of the 'Freeze' mode buttons is clicked.
3. The volume starts the fade downwards to zero.
4. The volume stays at zero for a few milliseconds, whilst the switching takes place.
5. The volume starts to fade back up.
6. The volume reaches maximum level again.

Once again, there wasn't a standard pre-prepped switch for the 'Freeze' mode button signal routing, so I made my own. It uses the 'constant volume' technique from a previous blog post, plus the 'gate~' switching describes earlier, with added 'fading' to dip the audio signals in and out at the right moments.

The three 'Freeze' modes are A, A+B, and B, which correspond to 'Tap', 'Final output', and 'Tap and Final output' being fed back to the input of the delay. the volume compensation is done using a 1/n multiplier, so that the final multipliers multiply by 1 for single inputs, or by half for two inputs. The fading is done by the 'p dip_mr' objects, whilst the gate~ objects do the switching, and the 'pipe' objects just delay th switching so that it happens when the volume is zero. But the really interesting stuff is in the 'dip' object:

Unfortunately, once you have seen it, then it isn't quite a magical as you might have expected. The line falls to zero in 50 milliseconds (ms), then stays there for 10 ms, then rises back to 1 in 50 ms again. The 0to 1 values of this 'fat' or 'dip' envelope are the multiplier value used in the multipliers, so there's no complicated conversions required. Here's the same thing expressed as a timing diagram:

So the trigger happens when one of the 'Freeze' buttons is clicked. The fade envelope starts to fall, and when it reaches zero, then the multiplier is zero, which means that no audio gets through the multiplier. The switch control has been delayed from when the trigger happened, and the audio signal is switched whilst the envelope is at zero and there is no audio signal getting through. Once the switching has happened, then the fade envelope returns back to 1, and the audio has been switched without any click happening.

This 'dip' fade envelope technique can be used whenever you want to switch from one audio signal to another without having a click. There are other ways to do it, including some that don't have any 'dip' in the audio, but this is a simple starting point for further explorations.

Filtering

I have struggled with the filtering all the way through the two 'AUDpiPOde' devices. In this 'A' version, I have revised the filtering again, so there is now only a single low-pass filter instead of two in cascade, and the high-pass filter is now a State Variable design because the 'subtracted low-pass' technique didn't seem to work very well (but then inside a feedback loop is always a bad place for any filter!). This is far from a perfect design, and full credit to the Ableton coders who have a far superior filter in the original Ping Pong Delay, and in the new 10.1 Delay devices. If only such a filter was available in MaxForLive...

Getting  AUDpiPOde-A 0v05

You can download AUDpiPOde-A 0v05 for free from MaxForLive.com.

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 the blog post is behind the version number of MaxForLive.com...

Version 0.05 gives some idea of the development problems that I have had with these 'ping pong delay' devices! It seems that having ping pong delay plus several freeze modes is a good way to get confused about single routing, and I have made more mistakes than I want to think about. So my normal 'Work In Progress' label definitely applies to this device!

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then AUDpiPOde-A would require two band-pass filters, two delays, some utility switches, and two mixers, giving a total of about 5 ME.

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