Full-range Chromatic Note Remapper in Max For Live for Ableton Live

I have experimented with remapping previously with my MIDI ChromatixT, which takes incoming MIDI notes and changes their numbers to new ones, but each octave is treated the same, and when you generate a new mapping grid, then it is often a huge change and not the slight variation that I really wanted. So I've been playing around wth a few ideas...

MIDIchromatixN

MIDIchromatixN is the result. It combines two of the methods that I explored into one device: a random remapper and a modulo-arithmetic remapper. Both use almost exactly the same controls, and the outputs are very different - the random remapper is, well, random and wild, and the modulo remapper is more mathematical and constrained. In both cases, you need to follow them by a scale-setting device: the stock/factory Ableton Live Scale device is fine, or you could use my MIDINoteScalery device for extra control, proper invert and 'n'-octave folds as well.

MIDIchromatixN is basically just a look-up table. If you want to, you can set it so that the notes coming out have exactly the same note numbers as the ones going in (velocity is unchanged in this note remapper), but that isn't very useful. You can set it so that it inverts the whole MIDI note range as well, so that low MIDI notes become high ones, and vice-versa, but MIDINoteScalery makes that easy with a single button instead of setting about 8 rotary controls... However, if you want to gradually make changes to a constrained random (or mathematical pattern) mapping every so many bars, and have detailed control over the mapping, then you need MIDIchromatixN. In many ways, it is conceptually a bit like the stock/factory Saturator plug-in, but for note numbers rather than audio - and the mathematical functions it uses are different...

The flow diagram above also shows what you need to do to allow MIDIchromatixN to work. You need to have put some notes into a clip on the same track, and you need to add Scale or MIDI Note Scalery after MIDIchromatrixN. Finally, you need something to make a sound - any of the stock/factory Ableton Live Instruments is fine, or you could use a VST plug-in instrument.

So what does a remapper do?

A note remapper goes between the notes produced by a Clip and the sounds produced by an Instrument. MIDIchromatixN isn't sophisticated enough to do things 'in key', and so you need to add a scale controlling device after it. A remapper uses mathematical formulas to change the note numbers as they pass through. So As an example, with the Modulo mode selected, I tried 10 different variations when I input a C Major chord (C E G) and set the scale device to only let C Major notes through. The outputs were: C D A, C D A, F G D. A C G, D D F, A C G, D F C, G A F, C C D, and A F F, where a repeated letter indicates a note one octave higher. These output notes are consistent in Modulo mode - if you select a Variation number and input C E G then you will get exactly the same notes out again. Change the settings, and the output notes would be different, of course. In Random mode, things are slightly different, because the randomness gets shuffled each time you move some controls, and so, as the name suggests, you get more unpredictable 'random' notes out - and they won't be the same if you set the controls to the same settings. 

So what do you use it for?

A remapper can be used to change a melody (or chords). Whatever you put into the Clip, the output from the remapper is probably going to be different - unless you find one of the 'input=output' settings - and you would be able to see that on the display. So you can use it to create new melody ideas, or for generative music, or just for fun!

User Interface

As normal, I will go across the user interface from left to right...

There are two indicator lights with 'Yes/no' buttons underneath them, with rotary controls called 'AutoVar' or 'AutoRand'. These enable changes in the remapping to happen every 'n' bars. The 'Var' section controls the Variation rotary control, which makes small changes to the mapping. You can move the Variation rotary control manually to audition the effect that it has on the remapping of notes. The 'Var' section works in either of the two modes of operation (more about them in a moment). To enable the automatic variation, you just select the repetition rate (every 'n' bars) and click on the 'Yes/No' button so that it says 'Yes'. When Ableton Live's transport is running, then the indicator light will flash after that number of bars have happened, and the Variation rotary control will increase by one. After 127, it resets to 1 again.

Well, that WAS how it worked, right up until when I was writing this, where I realised that having the Variations button always cycle through all 128 possible values was a bit boring... As a result, I added 'Start' and 'Range' numbers, plus 'nudge' controls to adjust them, and now you can set the start Variation number, plus how many increments it will make before it returns to the start value. You can see the new controls on the far left hand side in the diagram above.

So if you set the Start to 1, and the Range to 4, then it will increment through Variations 1, 2, 3, and 4 (and then back to 1) every 'n' bars - where 'n' is set by the 'AutoVar' rotary control. If you set the Start to 8 and the Range to 16, then it will increment through Variations 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 (and then back to 1).

The 'AutoRand' section only works in the 'Random' mode, and causes a new random remapping to be generated every 'n' bars - if the 'Yes/No' button is set to 'Yes'. Note that the two auto bar settings can be different values. To the right of the AutoRand section is the 'Transport' section: the red/green indicator light shows when Live is stopped (red) or running (green).  The small indicator light will flash once every beat, and the bar count on the right will increment every bar. You need to make sure that you stop Live in order for the bar counting to work properly - just pressing the spacebar for pause doesn't work properly, but I'm working on it...

The main control just above the transport indicators is the 'Random/Modulo' button. In 'Random' mode the remappings are rough and 'random', plus the background colours are slightly more purple, whilst in 'Modulo' mode the remappings are more repetitive and mathematical in appearance. Apart from the AutoRand only happening in 'Random' mode, all of the other controls work in both modes.

Above the mode button are the main set of controls for the remapping. There are two identical mathematical generators inside, connected in series (the notes from the clip go through generator 1 first, then generator 2, then go to the Scale device) and each generator has a Range rotary control and a Step rotary control. Range sets the range of output notes, and Step sets the increment of the output notes within that range - which roughly equates to the slope of the diagonals (within limits, as we will see). If you set the controls like this:

...then you get what you might expect - the Ranges mean that the remapping uses the whole of the output range, whilst the step size of 1 means that every output note is used, and so you get a 1:1 mapping of input notes to output notes. So every incoming note will cause the exact same output note to be output, although the Scale device may then change that note, of course. You might wonder why you have a device that does nothing! But set the controls like this (turn Step2 to 64, and Pitch2 to 32):

...and things are now very different. The output range is only half what is was before, and there are now two different input notes that produce the same output note. Let's look at that 'sawtooth' shape in more detail...

The central user interface feature is what looks like a strange audio waveform on a dark background, or maybe a broken LFO waveshape. Above this are 128 numbers which define the mapping of input MIDI note numbers to output MIDI note numbers - and they are very small because for most purposes they are very boring and you may not need to use them very often! So when we had the first setting, then there was a straight line across the rectangle, from lower left to upper right. When we set the Range2 rotary control to 64, then there were two diagonal lines and we needed to alter the Pitch2 control to get the output notes playing the correct notes. So what would happen if we set the Step1 value to -1 instead of 1?

The screenshot above shows the effect of a Step1 of -1 - with Pitch2 increased to 95 to compensate for the pitch dropping. The diagonal lines are now sloping the opposite way. Let's reiterate how to think about the controls, and add a caveat: the Range controls set the output range of notes, but these may need adjusting with the Pitch controls so that they are not limited by the top and bottom (0 and 127) of the note numbers. 

Let's see what happens if we rewind a couple of steps and change Range1 down to 96:

This gives us one diagonal controlled by Range2, and another controlled by Range1. Okay, which means that the Range controls are separate. Got it.

Earlier I said that the Step controls changed the slope of the diagonals. If we change Step1 to -2, then this happens - but it shows that the Range 1 control might not have been doing what it seemed to be. Here's what it now looks like:

Yep, we have squashed two repeats into the space of one horizontally, and what looked like two little diagonals is now revealed to be just one. Unfortunately, just as you think you have got the hang of this, then there's a problem because when the diagonals get to a certain slope, then they 'alias', just like digital audio. Here's what this looks like:

There have been several changes to the Range and Step values, but what you see instead of the nice, neat diagonals, are more complex mappings between the input and the output. But the same principles apply: Range sets the output note range, Pitch puts the notes back into a usable range, and Step alters the diagonals - except that now we have individual aliased dots instead of diagonal lines. Here's another example of the sort of mapping that you can produce:

In the course of playing with the values, the two Pitch controls on the far right hand side have also been introduced, and they complete the user interface. Don't forget that the Scale device that follows allows you to constrain the output of the remapper so that it plays only the notes that you want, and remember that you could use the MIDI NoteScalery device instead of scale, so that you can have more scales, better folding, correct inverting, etc.:

One final thing to note: if you try to set the Step value to zero, then the rotary control background will turn red to remind you that you shouldn't use this value.

Theory 

The rectangle with all the sawtooth and dots in it is really just a squashed lookup table:

The diagonal line that we started with should really be like this: 128 values on the lower edge for the input note numbers from 0 to 127, and 128 values on the right hand edge for the output note numbers from 0 to 127. Because the diagonal sets how an input maps to an output, then in this case, any input number maps to the same output number. 42 in maps to 42 out, as shown on the diagram above.

Do you remember when Step2 was set to 64, and the Pitch2 was adjusted so that the two sawtooth shapes were in the middle of the display? Let's look at what this does to the mapping:

The two sawtooths set the mapping of input note numbers to output note numebrs, so when there are two shapes like this, there are two inputs for every output. So an input of 43 produces an output of 78, but so does an input of 98. The smaller the output range, the more there will be several notes on the input that produce the same output note number. If you tweak the settings, then you will probably find some that produce a horizontal line, and this is a special case: there is only one output note number, and every input note number maps to that number. This isn't very useful...

If you look up MIDIchromatixT, then you will see that it only has 12 inputs and outputs, and that it repeats that octave for the full 0-127 range. MIDIchromatixN has no repeats! All 128 note input numbers are mapped individually to the 128 output note numbers.

When the Range and Step values give us mappings that aren't anything like a nice simple diagonal line, then the mapping can be lots more complex. Here's a Random mode mapping:

This mapping has none of the obvious repeated patterns of previous examples, but you should now be able to confidently adjust the output range of notes by changing the Range values, and then using the Pitch values to get the pitches at the right place, and know that changing the Step values will alter where the dots are horizontally.

Inside

This time I'm not going to go very deep into how MIDIchromatixN works in Max For Live, and instead I'm going to show how one very useful bit of the UI is done, and show you where to find more related stuff.

The little red/green indicator light that shows when Live is stopped or running is the target. The code looks like this:

For when Live's transport is not running/playing. However, if you try to open the Help page for this, then you get the help page for a patcher object, which isn't quite a useful. instead, what you need to do is go to the 'Extras' menu in Max:

...and there is the M4L.api.ListOfAbstractions, which opens a window full of interesting objects:

,,,including the one that I used to find out if Live was running or stopped - there in the lower right hand box. Clicking on the text for Global.ObserveTransport opens the tiny little box on the far right hand side, which shows how to use it. Here's that same code, but this time with Live's transport running:

Each of those six boxes covers a topic, and there are all sorts of other interesting objects in there, ready for you to use!

Getting MIDIchromatixN_mr

You can get MIDIchromatixN_mr here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6263/midichromatixn

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...

Getting MIDI Note Scalery 

MIDI Note Scalery can be downloaded from here, with documentation here.

    https://maxforlive.com/library/device/5260/midinotescalery

Modular Equivalents

In terms of basic modular equivalents, then implementing MIDIchromatixN_mr is quite awkward. The Make Noise 'Maths' module starts to get somewhere close, but not entirely. The Expert Sleepers 'Disting mk4' also gets close, and maybe the Quantizer can be tweaked suitably, or possibly the Waveform Animator, maybe. But I couldn't find a direct equivalent. This means, of course, that I will get a comment pointing me to a classic module that I have overlooked, or never heard of, or forgotten, or didn't know about - there are lots of modules out there. Anyway, until then, I don't have an ME for this device... (This is a first, I think!)

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Polyphonic note probability and velocity randomisation Max For Live device in Ableton Live

'Prob' is an ongoing background project of personal 'fixers' that I sometimes release utilities from - list below. So here's the latest device from that, and unlike previous devices, this one isn't intended specifically for drum sounds (but...).

There's not very much in the UI, and most of the MIDI processing inside uses the 'message box' method that I've been exploring recently. But what it does is something that I find very useful, and it builds on MIDIswapNV and the rest of the 'prob' series of devices... (The core of MIDIprobNV is based on MIDIswapNV!)

MIDIprobNV

MIDIprobNV is a simple utility that does two things to MIDI notes that pass through it: it allows the probability of a note being passed through to be controlled, and it also allows the velocity of the notes that pass through to be offset and a random value added. In other words: it allows you to control the percentage of missing notes, and to adjust how much extra variation is added to the velocity. This allows you to vary MIDI note streams quickly and in a useful way - and I use it all the time!

The 'Probability' rotary control sets the probability of a note passing through the device. At 100%, all the notes should go through. At 0%, no notes will go through. At 50%, half of the notes will go through, but they are randomly chosen, so you do not have any way of controlling (or knowing) which notes will get through. The note choice is polyphonic, so if you play a chord, then some of the notes will get through, whilst others will not. So broad, jazzy chords will get thinned out, but will be voiced differently each time you repeat them, with different notes being dropped. (If you want the opposite effect, where notes are added to the ones you play, then you could try auditioning devices like Spitfire Audio's 'Stratus' Kontakt device...)

Note that the next two rotary controls and bar displays will only work when notes are actually passing through the device! This helps to reduce the CPU load...(I think...)

The 'RandomV' rotary control sets how much random velocity you add or subtract to the original velocity of the incoming notes. If it is set to 0%, then nothing is added or subtracted. If it is set to 100%, then it is probably going to max out the MIDI velocity at 127. (the device clips MIDI velocity, because the repercussions of MIDI velocities above 127 are not good!) In between these limits, you can add as much extra randomness as you want. Note that your sound-producing instrument needs to have some velocity sensitivity, otherwise no amount of random velocity will affect it!

The 'Offset' rotary control adjusts the middle value of the output velocity. If this is set to 0, then the outgoing velocity will have random velocity values added or subtracted to it, and the average will be much the same as the incoming velocity. If you increase the offset value, then the output velocity will tend to be higher, whilst decreasing it will reduce the output velocity. Remember that the values that are added to or subtracted from the incoming velocity are random, and so there will be a range of range of velocities.

This is where the three 'bar' displays come in. The one on the left simply shows the incoming velocity. The one on the right has two parts: the left side is the actual outgoing velocity, but alongside it on the right is a 'Range' bar that shows the maximum and minimum values that it can have. The size of the range bar changes as you alter the 'RandomV' rotary control - the bigger the RandomV value, the bigger the range bar. Changing the 'Offset' rotary control moves the range bar up and down, so you can immediately see when the output MIDI velocity is too low (1) or too high (127). 

I always try to avoid repeating other devices, so MIDIprobNV combines probability control with random velocity, which means that it hopefully provides a very different way of controlling these two parameters than you get with the stock 'Velocity' plug-in. I'm particularly proud of the range display, which I may use in other devices - modulation controls have always been something that I have wanted to make more intuitive... For the final release I have also added 'scrolling 'history' plots, so you can see what the velocity values have been back in time...

 In use

MIDIprobNV 'thins' out MIDI notes at random that you pass through it, so on chords it will change the voicing, and you may lose the root note. On melody lines or arpeggios, then it will remove notes at random, which can include the first note in a bar, which can sound unusual. One mitigation for this is to include a second track where you include all the notes that you definitely need to hear!

The demo track on SoundCloud uses two tracks, but has an arpeggio on track 1, and chords on track 2. The settings of MIDIprobNV are similar on the two tracks, and the delay and reverb are much the same for both tracks. The same instrument is used on both tracks, but is tweaked slightly. The musical content of the demo is not going to win any awards - but it serves well as a way of showing one way to use MIDIprobNV.

Here are the chords on track 2:

Remember that MIDIprobNV will remove notes from these! (So the density of notes is not as bad as it appears!)

Here are the arpeggios on track 1:

Again, this is just to provide raw material for MIDIprobNV to thin out...

And the tone generation:

I have used a stock MIDI LFO to modulate the 'Probability' rotary control in MIDIprobNV so that it varies from 75-ish to 40-ish, so the number of notes removed keeps varying. I do this on both tracks, with different LFO speeds. 'Muted1 Impure' is a modified stock/factory preset for Analog...

Finally the effects: 

A tiny bit of my fave 'ping pong' delay, and a stock reverb. Nothing special.

Yes, I know the chords are too loud! Hopefully, despite my rapid mixing (no time!), you can see/hear that what should be a mind-bogglingly boring set of chords and a pedestrian arpeggio turns into something much more useful when it is 'thinned'. The chords and arpeggios took a couple of minutes to put into Ableton's piano roll, but there's hours of wannabee elevator music lurking...

I'm sure that you can do much better than this!

You can extend the LFO-control here to use clip envelopes, as seen here:

      https://youtu.be/kExh6YBzICk
      http://blog.synthesizerwriter.com/2020/02/dawless-or-ableton-live-only-inspired.html

One other use is to remove notes from drum clips! See below for the earlier devices in the 'Prob' series which allow you to set exactly which notes/sounds are processed, but MIDIprobNV just removes drum sounds without caring, which may be exactly what you want... Once again, a good ay of using this may be to record two tracks, where one contains essential beats, whilst the other one is where MIDIprobNV can remove notes as it feels like it...

The RandomV and Offset rotary controls can also be controlled by other dvices via the Ableton Live 'remote control' 'control voltage' 'Map' buttons that you find on devices like LFOs...

Previous devices in the 'Prob' series...

MIDIiprob+D4    (Includes time delays as well!)

MIDIprobD4       (Simple 4-note probability control)

MIDIoffGRID4   (Lots of time delay variations! Closely related to, and almost one of the 'Prob' series...but named for clarity with what it does!)

Previous devices with similar names, which might be confusing...

MIDIprobablyR  (Actually a very sophisticated probabilistic step sequencer from a different series - the 'Probably' series!)

SoundCloud demo

The SoundCloud demo is here:

https://soundcloud.com/martinruss/midiprobnv_mr01-demo-fade

Inside the M4L code...

I won't bore you with a random number generator and a '>' object! Instead, I thought it might be more interesting to look at timing considerations. One of the techniques that is used when designing anything where timing is important is to look at the code that is used most often, and the code that the main data flow goes through. In this case, these are both the same: for every MIDI note, there needs to be a probability calculation and a random velocity calculation, and so generating random numbers  is definitely going to be in the 'critical path' because it needs to happen for every MIDI note... Generating random numbers is probably going to take longer than a simple comparison for the probability calculation, so that's what I concentrated on. In the past, I've had problems with modulo functions taking a long time, so here I did some timing tests between the standard 'random' object in Max and one of the 'cheats' that sometimes gets used when time is critical. Here's the tester being used to try the 'random' object:

The 'timer' object measures the time (in milliseconds) between the bang in the left input, and the right input. I started out with the rotary control at 100, so the metro object was ticking quite slowly, and then turned it anti-clockwise to see if I could get the 'random' object to stutter/stop/repeat outputs, etc. As it happens, the initial delay was large, but rapidly settled down to 5 milliseconds, and I didn't see any repeated values (there's a scrolling multislider not shown here).

For an alternative, I used what is sometimes called 'captured entropy', which is just another way of saying that I captured 512 random numbers and put them in a lookup table:

The speed of this probably boils down to how efficiently the zl object can do a lookup...

What was interesting here was that the initial time delay was very large, presumably as buffering took place for those 512 random values, but then it stabilised. However, overall, it seems that zl is not as fast as the 'random' function. I did wonder about going for an implementation in Gen, but ran out of time... (In the lockdown, everyone I know is busier than usual!)

I did consider having a switch in the plug-in, so that you could choose between the built-in 'random' function (which the documentation says is a pseudo-random generator (quite normal - I wasn't expecting a cryptography-quality function!)) and the 'captured randomness' version. Would you start to notice the repetition every 512 notes? But in the end I went for speed, and so there's only the stock/factory random function in the released version. But at least I did some checking! (Although checking timing in the same environment is not the best technique!)

One thing which I did think about was to deliberately exploit repeated patterning instead of pseudo-randomness, and so there may be a plug-in that uses that at some date in the future...

Getting MIDIprobNV_mr01

You can get MIDIprobNV_mr01 here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6230/midiprobnv

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 MIDIprobNV_mr01 requires very little beyond a couple of noise generators, plus two sample & hold modules, giving an ME of about 4!

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Different Two - dual channel 'old school' step sequencer for parameter control sinking and sourcing

Sometimes you just don't see the wood for the trees. It happened to me when there was a question on the Facebook Max For Live Users group about a step sequencer. from Johan Wallen The OP wanted to control the slider values in a step sequencer with an external MIDI Controller. As it happens, one of the side effects of having a ready-made maxforlive object that does just about everything you might ever want in a step sequencer means that MaxForLive.com has many, many 'live.step'-based step sequencers available on it. But 'live.step' has limits (everything does!), and the question made me think - could you even do what was being asked for with live.step?

Bait taken. I was quickly in Max and testing out live.step, and it was true - you couldn't Apple/Cntrl-M map a MIDI controller to the sliders that control the pitch, velocity, etc. in live.step. Note that the intended usage for live.step is that you use the mouse to set the sliders, and then map the output to a parameter in another device. This was different - controlling the sliders themselves in live.step with a MIDI Controller. Challenge accepted.

Not using live.step was going to be interesting. Back to first principles...

The result is MIDIdifferentTWO, which is, of course, different to MIDI differentONE! TWO is deliberately 'old-school' in design, with rotary controls and big lights for each step, and is built without using live.step. So there's a classic 'counter' object to generate the steps, the rotary controls are scanned using an 8-way 'gate' object, and the lights are the standard 'blink' / 'bang' buttons. driven by a 'switch 8'object.  To complicate matters, the 'gate' object allows values to pass through it, but you have to send the value, and a rotary control only outputs a value when you change it (or bang it). My attempt at a solution was to use a 'message' object as a buffer between the rotary control and the 'gate' object, and this seems to work quite well, at the cost of quite a bit of wiring up of bangs...

I was wondering if I should use the buffer contents to replace the parameter value of the rotary controls, but decided in the end that this wasn't required. I also rejected the idea of using the buffer as the map target for the Ableton 'remote control' system 'control voltages', so that I could have the rotary controls set as 'hidden', but I'm leaving this as an option depending on feedback. The Ableton M4L Guidelines for hiding objects so that they don't overwhelm the Undo history seems to be incompatible with making controls map targets, so this design has some flexibility in terms of possible mitigations.

The Max For Live code above is simplified, and there's a missing connection! The step clock output from the counter should be connected to the left-hand input of the 'gate 8' object - but you can always look at the real code if you download the amxd from MaxForLive.com.

The initial design was just a rapid response to a Facebook 'Max For Live Users' group query, and so was me trying to see if I could make do without live.step. The result then went through several drafts to the latest release (so far) of 0.06, adding direction to the steps (the counter object makes this easy, shuffling of the order of the steps (via a look-up table), skipping of steps (using the pack object to remove/restore numbers in the look-up table, and adding a second channel synchronised to Live's transport. Having two channels, where one can be free-running (or driven by MIDI events in a clip, which probably counts as user-controlled-sync!) and the other is locked to the DAW transport gives two very different, contrasting sources of 'control voltages', plus it also looks good. For a single channel 8 step, un-synced step sequencer, then I might have been tempted to put the rotary controls in two rows to reduce the width of the device (M4L Guidelines again!), and I might even have thrown away the 'old school' look and used sliders, but two channels means that the width is going to be wide anyway, and stacking two sliders vertically doesn't work for me. 

Implementing the 'Skipping' of steps required additional map targets for each step, and I was thinking of a Novation Launch Control (or XL) when I was doing this, but there are lots of other MIDI Controllers available. The solution was to just use a toggle text object as the map target...  One complication in the Max For Live coding was how to deal with the number of steps when you could skip or un-skip steps, but once again, the 'counter' object makes changing the count maximum easy, and so I just used the look-up table length as the counter maximum, and it was sorted! I'm always intrigued by how some problems loom ahead as being major, maybe insurmountable  challenges, but when you actually start to code them, they kind of shrink and aren't as impossible as you anticipated. There again sometimes apparently simple things can take ages to figure out, so there's no certainties!

The blinking lights proved to be one of the most challenging things to get right... The 'button' object has a parameter called 'blinktime', which controls how long the light stays on once it gets a 'bang' signal. Unfortunately, when the rate at which you scan across the steps changes, then blinktime needs to change as well - ideally so that there is no overlap with other steps so two lights are both lit at once, and without any gaps where no light is lit at all. This turns out to be difficult! Now if the 'button' object would just light up for the whole of the time that a step was active, like an LED or even a bulb, then it would be easy. But initially I didn't want to mess about making a custom graphic object like that, although eventually I decided that I had to, and here's what I did...

I wrote a special object just to decode the step number to drive scrolling lights! As often happens with these things, (and as noted above!) when you sit down to do it, then it isn't as difficult as you expected. It turned out to be nothing more than a set of compares, but instead of using the 'button' object as the indicator, I used the live.toggle object, which shows one colour when you send it a one, and another colour when you send it a zero. So now the steps are shown by an indicator that lights up for the whole of that step, and is off the rest of the time. Neat and much better than my previous default indicator: the 'button' object. Sometimes being forced into a change is good for you...

Notice that this time the missing connection is missing no longer! So what do the comparisons look like inside the scroll_mr package?

As I said, all a bit obvious really. But it works very nicely!

Using MIDIdifferentTWO

For something that started out as about half an hour's coding in response to a Facebook query, the final result (so far) has quite a lot going on! So, as usual, here's a side-to-side detailed descriptoon of all of the controls and what they do:

First, notice that there are two separate step sequencers. The top one can be either free-running (with its own clock running at the 'Rate' speed when the 'Mode' selector is set to '=Not Synced=' (I'm never sure if there should be an 'h' in synced/synched...), or else triggered by one of five different MIDI Events from the clip in Ableton Live: Any MIDI Note, Any change of MIDI Note Number (so repeated notes trigger the step advance the first time, but not after that), Note number 0 (very low frequency!), Note Zero with a MIDI Velocity of zero (the lowest, quietest note in MIDI 1.0!), or any note with a MIDI Velocity of 1 (the quietest note in MIDI 1.0). Because these MIDI Events are in the clip on the track in Ableton Live, then they are synced to Live's transport, but there's nothing to stop you having all sorts of weird timing of those notes, and don't forget the 'ignore repeated note' mode. The lower step sequencer is always synced to Live's transport, but you can choose anything from the step advancing every 8 bars to every quarter beat, which is quite a big range.

Both sequencers have the same controls after the speed/sync section. After the step number and a little count-up indicator, downwards there is the Direction control, which allows selection of left-right (ascending through the numbered steps), right-to-left (descending), and back & forth (palindrome mode, as some say). Underneath are two tiny toggle buttons. '1-8' and 'Skips' forces the full 8 steps when it is showing '1-8', whilst in 'Skips' mode the step numbers can be clicked so that they turn into 'X's, and then that step will not happen (and the length of the sequence will be shorter). Sequences that are one step long are okay, but they aren't very interesting! As you click on the step numbers to change them to the 'X's, then you will see that a row of tiny numbers will change to show the missing number. The 'Shuffle' button changes the order that the sequencer plays the steps - and again the row of tiny numbers will change to reflect the new order. Each time you get the 'Shuffle' button then the order will change. The lowest controls are nudge '+/-' buttons for the sequence length, shown as a small blue number on the left side. The step length automatically changes when you set up skips.

The central section is 'old-school': rotary controls for setting the step values, and big indicators to show which step is playing. The modern twist here is that the step numbers (in the grey squares) can be used to skip steps, but there's another hidden twist - you can control the rotary controls and the skip buttons with Ableton Live's 'remote control' 'control voltage' system. To do this, you either use the Map button in an LFO or other device, and then click on the rotary control of the grey step number square in MIDIdifferentTWO, or you put Ableton Live into MIDI Learn mode (Apple/Control-M to get into the 'blue' mode), then click on a rotary control or a grey step number square and move a slider or press a button on an external MIDI Controller. If you did this is the right order then the rotary control or step number will show an indication of the note number of MIDI controller that you have mapped to that control in a small grey box, and a line will appear in the 'Mapping' table at the upper left of Ableton's screen.

For testing, I used a Novation Launch Control to control the skips:

In the photo above you can see that the four lit buttons on the Novation Launch Control have turned steps 5,6,7, and 8 on the upper sequence into 'X's, and so those steps will be skipped. Also note that the sequence length has changed to 4 steps (the little number on the left). When I took the phot I was just about to map the rotary controls on the Launch Control to the rotary controls for the step values in MIDIdifferentTwo, so that I could control the sequence from the external MIDI Controller. You could, of course, use just about any MIDI Controller to control the sequencers inside MIDIdifferentTWO... Using an external MIDI Controller like this crosses the line from DAWless to 'DAWed', of course, but using a MIDI Controller definitely looks 'DAWless'!

After the eight sets of step  controls, the section on the right hand side deals with the output values of the step sequencers. The large blue numbers are the current output value - there's a label that says so! Underneath this is a 'Normal/Invert' toggle button, which inverts the value (so 127 becomes zero, and zero becomes 127). Next on the right are three rotary controls. 'Offset' adds to the value of each step, and can be used as a way to shift all of the values at once. If you are controlling a filter with the step sequencer, then this would behave just like the cut-off frequency control in the filter, for example. The 'Depth' rotary control scales the step values. At zero it scales the values down to nothing, so you won't hear any effect. At 100% the output is the values shown on the rotary controls. At 200%, the output is scaled to twice the values shown on the rotary controls - which means that the output value may well 'max out' at 127! The final rotary control is the 'Smooth' control, which is like the 'Slew' control on modular synths, and it turns abrupt jumps of value into more gentle slower 'slides' - it 'smoothes' the output!

Finally, there are two 'Map' buttons and their inverses, 'Unmap' buttons. You use these to map the output values of the two step sequences to other instruments, effects, or utilities inside Ableton Live. Controls that are being controlled generally go grey to indicate that they are being controlled from somewhere else (LFO, MIDI Controller, etc.), and their value moves on its own! To unmap and select another control, you use the 'Unmap' button.

Sinking and sourcing?

These are electronics terms for outputs and inputs respectively. In lots of electronic interfaces, an output is a source of current flow (it 'sources' current is the colloquial phrase), and an input is a sink of current flow (it 'sinks' it is the colloquial phrase). So for the MIDIdifferentTWO device, the step rotary controls and the grey step number squares are sinks, and an LFO or MIDI Controller that is controlling it via Ableton's 'remote control' control voltage' system would be a source. At the output of MIDIdifferentTWO, the two big 'Map' buttons are sources, and whatever they control would be sinks. Jargon, that's all.

In use

One thing to try is to change the cut-off frequency of a filter (a well-worn cliche that you can also do with the stock/factory 'Auto Filter' effect), or change the time delay of Delay (there isn't a stock/factory effect that does this!), or change the Depth in the Saturator effect to give an interesting rhythmic 'bite' variation. Basically, whatever your favourite 'control to tweak' is, you can now apply a shimmering, rhythmic version of it automatically, and free up that hand for something else, like pitch bend, or a mod wheel, or mousing, or adjusting knobs on outboard gear, or anything else. Now I know that I already have a device called '3rd Hand' (look it up on MaxForLive.com), but this is a bit like having a third hand!

Getting MIDIdifferentTWO_mr

You can get MIDIdifferentTWO_mr here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6160/mididifferenttwo

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 MIDIdifferentTWO_mr is just two step sequencers, giving an ME of 2. The ability to control step values and skips may vary with the specific sequencer, but if implemented, then it is just more patch cables. Perhaps MEs should also include some sort of measure for the number of patch cables that are required?

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Completing the 'Smooth' Suite - Max For Live plug-ins for Ableton Live

It started with MIDIrandomA, which provided several different type of 'constrained randomness' triggered by either MIDI events or a built-in LFO, and then allowed it to control parameters in other Ableton Live devices using what they call 'remote control' but most people associate with the 'Map' button. Blog reader hems suggested that it would be good if this could produce more than one mappable output, which is how MIDIrandomABC was conceived. But then, after further reflection,  the smoothing function that happens in MIDIrandomA seemed to be useful in a broader context, and so I produced MIDIsmoothR, where you can input any 'control voltage' rather than solely random noise, and so smooth/process any LFO or MIDI Controller...

However, MIDIrandomA and MIDIsmoothR are big, complex, flexible, versatile Max For Live devices. They can be daunting for a new user because there's a lot to tweak! So although MIDIsmoothRRR with three mappable outputs was an obvious follow-up, it seemed like this was a good time to also release the opposite: simple, minimalistic utility devices that just do the 'smoothing' function, plus offsetting and scaling. And so, the 'Smooth' Suite was born:

- MIDIsmoothR - single mappable output, sophisticated 'control voltage' smoothing and processing.

- MIDIsmoothRRR - three mappable outputs of sophisticated 'control voltage' smoothing and processing.

- MIDIsmoothY - single mappable output, smoothing only.

- MIDIsmoothD - just a scrolling display of the 'control voltage'.

- MIDIsmoothYD - single mappable output, with the scrolling display in the background.

These last four devices complete the Suite. MIDIsmoothD allows any 'remote control' 'control voltage' to be viewed graphically, and MIDIsmoothY is small and easy to use. For those people who like stuff to look cool, then there is MIDIsmoothYD's scrolling background.

In the (imperfect!) screen capture above, the LFO waveform is sent to the three 'Smooth' Suite devices: first MIDIsmoothY, then MIDIsmoothYD, and finally MIDIsmoothD.

MIDIsmoothRRR

MIDIsmoothRRR doesn't just add two extra mappable outputs. The B and C processing channels are augmented as well, so there's quite a bit of divergence from the MIDIrandomA original.

The B channel now has separate 'Thin' power-law controls for the Up and Down segments of the waveform, unlike the 'affects both segments' 'Thin' rotary control in channel A. You should explore the way that the Up and Down smoothing controls and the associated Thin rotary controls affect the output waveshape - note that the two pairs of controls work (mostly) independently.

The C channel now has a 'Thin' power-law rotary control added after the 'Delta' rotary control. The Delta control removes any samples in the waveform that are less than the set value, which isn't immediately obvious if you use a triangle or sawtooth input waveform, so it is very different to the A and B channels - the scrolling doesn't happen at the same rate because of the missing samples, for instance.

The design of the processing in the three channels is deliberately very different. As with the original MIDIrandomA, I wanted to provide three very different outputs with as little overlap as possible. As a bonus, you also get two new variations on random-ness in channels B and C when you replace the 'Input' with 'Random'.

Map

Here's a simple infographic showing all of the members of the 'Smooth Suite':

In use

The screen capture and diagram above shows a LFO controlling the 'CV in' rotary control of MIDIsmoothRRR via 'remote control' mapping. The triangle wave is turned into a rather nice 'shimmery flame' waveshape by the B channel, and this is then sent to the MIDIsmoothD device to display it.

There's an additional 'hidden in plain sight' function in R, RRR, Y and YD: if you don't map the 'CV in' rotary control, then you can use it as a controller to produce processed outputs to control othr devices. Just click on it and move it!

Documentation

There was one previous blog post covering the first device in the 'Smooth Suite' - MIDIsmoothR. But this was a variant of an earlier series of devices: the 'Random' series.

MIDIsmoothR

MIDIrandomABC

MIDIrandomA

Downloads

In the past, I produced a 'dark' and 'light'-themed UI version of a delay effect, just to see which was more popular. The downloads so far (to 10th April 2020) are:

                   Dark       Light
KeyMon              400         348
Field Echo         1293         870
Sine3Generator      941         629
SpecD/PanEcho      1371        1225

For the 'shim' 'Smooth Suite' utility devices, the initial downloads indicate that the 'bare-bones' MIDIsmoothY is the most popular, then the 'background display' MIDIsmoothYD, and the 'display only' MIDIsmoothD has had the fewest downloads. Of course, none of these come close to one of my devices, which has had no downloads at all, ever!

Getting the devices in the 'Smooth' Suite.

You can get MIDIsmoothR_mr02 here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6116/midismoothr

You can get MIDIsmoothRRR_mr02 here:

    https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6127/midismoothrrr

You can get MIDIsmoothY_mr01 here:

    https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6129/midismoothy

You can get MIDIsmoothYD_mr01 here:

    https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6132/midismoothyd

You can get MIDIsmoothD_mr01 (the display only) here:

    https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6130/midismoothd

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 MIDIsmoothR_mr02 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 maths/data processing module can do the required computation, then there's one noise generator, one processing module, some triggering logic, an LFO for the free-running version, and a sequencer for parameter storage, giving an ME of 4 or 5!

MIDIsmoothRRR is just additional CV scaling and offsetting, plus two more patch cables! So an ME of 7.

MIDIsmoothY, MIDIsmoothD, and MIDIsmoothYD require only three modules: a slew rate limiter, a CV scaler and offset processor module, and an oscilloscope module. So the ME is 3.

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Sound Design: Ping-Pong sound in Ableton Live

In a complete break from the traditional content on this blog, here's a quick bit of sound design.

How to make a sound that works well to accompany a ping-pong video where a bat hits a ball... 

Piano roll a G3 and then a G4, a bar apart. For some reason, octave intervals work well for this type of sound... Try changing the intervals and see! I think it is something to do with the two different pitches being perceived as being at different distances or positions, but I've never managed to find any published research on this topic. (Which doesn't mean there isn't any, of course - one of the fascinating things about the InterWeb is that you can't always find things... Searches are not perfect, or deterministic...)

Generation

Take a sine wave, give it a fast attack, 80 ms decay, sustain zero, no release, and use a pitch envelope to pull it up from about 6 semitones down at the start of the note, pretty quickly.

The sine wave is used purely because many real world objects have a tendency to oscillate with the simplest possible waveform (and arguably the most efficient: the sine wave uses the least energy to wobble!)

The fast attack is because the transfer of energy from a hard (-ish) bat to a (hard) ball happens quickly. Compare and contrast the sound made by the strings on a tennis racket when it hits a fluffy tennis ball.

The slightly slower decay is just long enough that you can hear it (80ms is about ten times the shortest sound that you seem to be able to perceive, which is why a 'fast' 5ms attack time seems like it is fast!) and not long enough so that you become too distracted by the pitch.

The rising pitch envelope at the start of the sound adds to the natural-ness of the sound. Real-world sounds often seem to take time to get into a stable oscillation, and so this is a way of sign-posting that this is a sound that is meant to be used in a naturalisic context.

(Of course, for a true 'real' sound, then a recording of the actual sound would appear to be the best one to use... But this assumes that the actual sound is what people expect and is effective! I'm reminded of the sound of a soft drinks can being opened and the frothy liquid being poured into a glass that was synthesized by Suzanne Ciani many years ago...)

Which produces:

You might have noticed that the Noise generator is turned on, but with a very low cut-off on the 'Color' low-pass colour filter. This is very 'red' noise, and is used to add a bit of extra 'bat hits ba;;' randomness to the start of the sound. A more sophisticated implementation would use two synthesizer sound sources: one for the sine wave, and another for the noise burst (probably with a faster decay). For this simple example, I have just added in a bit of noise to the sine wave.

This 'tone plus noise' technique is usually credited to the French composer Jean-Claude Risset, and some drum synthesizer methods are often referred to as 'Risset' drums (For example: there's a 'Risset Drum' plug-in included in the Audacity audio editor software.). This works very well - using band-pass or resonant low-pass filters to filter noise so that it adds uncertainty to a low frequency tone is very good for emulating many drum sounds, and is used on some classic 70s (and 80s, even though samples were becoming increasingly popular) drum machines.

So that's the 'generation' part of the sound done. Note that the filter is wide open - using a resonant low-pass filter on a sine wave is usually spectacularly unimpressive. Now to the 'processing' part.

Processing

Next, apply a bit of hard saturation with soft clipping, followed by compression to tighten it up. Finally, wet reverb in high quality mode with early reflections, reflect and diffuse full on, and sized to taste.

The saturation-based waveshape 'distortion' is to add a bit of non-linearity to the louder parts of the sound. A pure sine wave sounds boring, and so adding a bit of 'over-drive' makes it sounds more 'real'. Imperfections are often what turns a synthetic sound into one that is more interesting and less 'synthetic'. The compression enhances the decay, and it also sounds like a compressor - which is another interesting imperfection: your ear knows what a compressor sounds like, and so putting a compressor in the sound tells your ear that you are hearing a sound that has been recorded. Adding in an artificial noise floor might be another method of adding fake cues for 'reality'.

(The real experts in using subtle cues to make audio sound real are the people who add sounds to movies and TV. For animations in particular, there are no sounds with the pictures, and so everything needs to be added: rustles, bangs, knocks, footsteps, soft drinks cans being opened, kissing, cutting bread, slurping coffee and more. This process if called 'Foley', named after Jack Foley, who was one of the people who used a wide variety of props to add sounds to moving pictures. Of course, a Foley artist would probably use a bat and ball for this particular piece of sound design...)

The reverb is really two things: the early reflections and the 'space'. The rapid echoes known as reflections accentuate the sharpness of the attack, and they emphasise that energy has been transferred. Blockbuster movies use a variety of busy, wobbly or low, growly sounds to indicate the movement of power, and these are so ingrained in what people expect that it feels wrong when you don't get them in real life. Spaceships in space don't make sounds, and yet you 'know' (and expect) that all of that pent-up energy required to thrust them into hyper-space just has to make a sound! Without the sound, it would feel 'fake'...). The 'space' part of the reverb is to give the listener a sense that the focus of their attention should be the bat hitting the ball - everything else goes 'out of focus', but it also imposes an artificial spacial environment that isn't present in reality. The apparent big reverberant space gives the sound gravitas, importance, significance - it screams (gently): 'Watch me!'

Which all looks like this in Ableton Live stock audio effects:

Results

The resulting sounds are available on SoundCloud. The demo track contains just two notes: a G3 and a G4. (using the Ableton 'C3=60' note naming convention) The result is not perfect (and what is?), but imho a good starting point for this type of sound... You should use this tutorial as a starting point to exploring with your own personal variations - just copying what I've done will only get you part of the way along the lifetime quest that is sound design. For further study, you could compare and contrast my sound to commercial examples in music tracks and sound libraries...

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Max For Live 'Control Voltage' Smoothing device for Ableton Live...

I admit here and now that I don't know what to call the signals that go from an LFO to a mapped parameter in Ableton Live. If they weren't inside a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) but were transferred by patch cables in a modular synth, then I would call them 'control voltages'. Ableton call the process 'remote control', but they don't seem to say what the signals are called. So in the absence of any authoritative guidance, I'm going to call them 'control voltages' but in quotes - that way I'm trying to indicate that they aren't voltages, but that I'm hijacking the phrase because I don't know what they should really be called...

But I do know the name of the subject of this blog post: MIDIsmoothR! A combination 'control voltage' smoothing / slew rate limiter, plus a random 'control voltage' source. Here's the story of how it came to be:

The story

When I published MIDIrandomA and MIDIrandomABC, they were intended to be interesting alternatives to the LFOs that are often used as sources for 'remote control' of parameters in Ableton Live. Particularly the 'random' 'noise' waveforms that old-school synthesists like me call 'Sample & Hold' or 'S&H', even though there's a whole unspoken abbreviation in there - we mean: 'the jerky segmented waveform that you get when you apply a Sample & Hold device to a Noise generator' and the source of the resonant filter cut-off sound cliche.

In a world where there seems to be an assumption that noise comes in only three flavours: 'white', 'pink' and 'coloured' (The terminology is derived from the same spectrum-based descriptions as for light. So 'white' light contains all of the visible wavelengths, just as white noise has the same intensity at every audible frequency. Pink light contains more lower wavelengths (at the 'red' end of the spectrum) and so pink noise contains more lower frequencies.) Anyway, just as there are lots of different colours of light, so there are many, many different types of noise - from rumbles to hisses, with wind and 'waves breaking onto the sand' somewhere in there as well.

MIDI effect devices with names containing 'LFO' almost always provide a 'Random' waveform. Sometimes there are two different versions: a pure noise waveform, plus a flat segmented 'Sample & Hold' version. The problem is that having just a single jerky segmented 'Sample & Hold' waveform assumes that the distribution of values is right for your application, and it might be that you do not want each possible level to happen with the same probability. Which is where MIDIrandomA and MIDIrandomABC's remit comes from - lots of different varieties of random, noisy 'control voltages'.

But sometimes that S&H waveform is too jerky, and you need something more rounded, which is where MIDIsmoothR is used. It allows the 'control voltage' 'remote control' of any LFO or other MaxForLive device to be smoothed with a three different processing options. Just map the LFO or other device so that it is 'remote controlling' the 'CV in' rotary control in MIDIsmoothR, and set the 'input/Random' selector switch to 'Input' so that the 'control voltage' will be processed inside MIDIsmoothR.

The 3 processing channels? A allows waveform quantisation and power-law distortion. B allows separate smoothing to be applied to the rising and falling parts of the incoming waveform (plus global smoothing as well). C allows you to remove rapid changes (below the limit set by the 'Delta' rotary control), and then allows that to be smoothed. You can choose which of these smoothing/processing options is sent to the output with the A/B/C switch, and then offset or scale the value that is sent to the parameter which has been selected by the 'Map' button. (Click on 'map' and then click on the parameter that you want to control...).

If you switch the 'Input/Random' selector to 'Random', then MIDIsmoothR behaves very similarly to MIDIrandomA, although the A, B and C channel processing/smoothing is slightly different. As the name suggests, MIDIsmoothR is designed for smoothing!

The big selection box on the upper left hand side chooses how the input is sampled. The 'Not synced' top option uses the LFO clock set by the 'Rate' control to grab the input value. The other options on this selector allow various MIDI messages to trigger the sampling:

- Any MIDI Note,
- Any change of MIDI Note number (so repeated notes will not trigger the sampling),
- MIDI note number 0 (the lowest MIDI note),
- MIDI note number 0 with a velocity of 1 (the lowest note and the quietest velocity value), or
- Any MIDI note with  velocity of one (the quietest velocity).

Three in One

It isn't immediately obvious when you first look at MIDIsmoothR, but it actually allows you to do three different things:

- Process 'remote control' 'control voltages' in various ways, including smoothing (sometimes called 'slew rate limiting' on modular synths)
- Generate random 'control voltages' and map them to controls in other devices (Ignoring the 'CV in' rotary control)
- Sample & Hold 'control voltages' from other devices (LFOs, MIDI Controllers, etc.) using MIDI event triggers and use that to control other devices

If I can think of anything else that I can squeeze in there, it will be in a future update... And on that topic:

Version 0.01 had a bug in channel B, which caused a fixed value to be output. This is fixed in version 0.02.

'Remote control' processing...

MIDIsmoothR is quite unusual - there aren't many 'remote control' 'control voltage' processing devices written in MaxForLive for Ableton Live (or indeed, native devices from Ableton!). Normally, you use the 'Map' button to send 'control voltages' over the 'remote control' system from a device that produces 'control voltages' (like an LFO, or MIDIrandomA!) to a control parameter in a device that you want to control (just about any parameter (rotary controls, sliders, buttons... in just about any device). But MIDIsmoothR goes in-between those two devices, modifying/processing the 'control voltages'. (For a while, I did wonder if I should call it PROCsmoothR...)

Above is a diagram of a 'remote control' connection from an LFO to a Delay device. The LFO 'Map' button would show that it was controlling (for example) the time delay buttons in the Delay device.

Adding MIDIsmoothR to process the 'control voltage' looks like this in Ableton Live:

On the left side, the LFO 'Map' button shows that it is controlling the 'CV in' rotary control in MIDIsmoothR (and note that the input selector in MIDIsmoothR is set to 'Input'). On the right side, the MIDIsmoothR 'Map' button shows that it is controlling the time buttons in the Delay device.

(The 'L' is because this is where the mapping was set up - to the Left channel time delay buttons in Delay. But the 'sync' button is active in Delay, and so the right time delays are the same as the left buttons. You can see two channels of random 'control voltages' mapped to the left and right time delay buttons separately (sync is off) in the blog post about MIDIrandomABC... and you can hear the effect in this SoundCloud demo...) 

So the 'remote control' connections diagram now looks like this:

The LFO controls the CV In rotary control of MIDIsmoothR, which processes the LFO waveform and then controls the time delay buttons in the Delay device. Although you can't see the connections explicitly in Ableton Live, the text that replaces the 'Map' in the 'Map' button gives slightly cryptic clues...

In use

You could apply different random delay times to different notes in a sequence, which sounds really unusual.

Or you can randomise the detune of a two oscillator synth...

Or you can use a smoothed 'control voltage' to change the Size or Decay Time parameters of a Reverb, which can sound a bit like granular synthesis. Randomly changing the 'Diffuse' parameter in a Reverb sounds like a more sophisticated version of the classic 1980s 'gated reverb' effect...

Getting MIDIsmoothR_mr02

You can get MIDIsmoothR_mr02 here:

     https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6116/midismoothr

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 MIDIsmoothR_mr02 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 maths/data processing module can do the required computation, then there's one noise generator, one processing module, some triggering logic, an LFO for the free-running version, and a sequencer for parameter storage, giving an ME of 4 or 5!

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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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