£40.00 Original price was: £40.00.£30.00Current price is: £30.00.
To install MIDI Tools, first double-click to decompress the ZIP archive it arrived in. !
In Live’s Browser, navigate to the User Library in Places
Then find the MIDI Tools folder located there (2). If you don’t see a folder called MIDI Tools in your User Library, simply create it yourself.
We’d advice adding two subfolders for Generators and Transformers for neatness.
Finally, drag our Generators to the Generators subfolder and our Transformers to the Transformers subfolder
Live should automatically detect them and within the next few minutes, they should appear in the dropdown chooser of Live’s Generators or Transformers in the corresponding tab of any MIDI Clip’s Note Editor.
PLEASE NOTE: Once installed MIDI Tools, since they are not Max MIDI Effects, cannot be dragged and dropped onto MIDI tracks: they can only be loaded by the Generator and Transformer tabs of the MIDI clip editor.
Initial Release – April 2024
This is a collection of 6 devices for making rhythmic music focusing on variation in Ableton Live 12. They are some of the first Max for Live MIDI Tools, which is a new class of Live device that generates and transforms MIDI clips.
I’ve always liked to make complex rhythmic music, but in the past I found the piano roll in Live to be clunky and tedious to use. MIDI Tools resolve this problem by allowing us to create simple devices that automate processes that would be tedious or impossible to execute manually. Every device in this collection is designed to help you make exciting, novel rhythmic music quickly and playfully.
The “quickly and playfully” is really important to me. For me, making electronic music has always been about getting a pattern running, listening to it, then tweaking it with whatever knobs and sliders are available to me. Working this way puts you in a sort of dialog with the machine, where you’re acting, then listening, then acting, then listening, and so forth. This process works best when the cycles are fast, which means that the tools have to be fun and easy to use. They have to deliver results quickly.
I could summarize the practical value of these tools with three statements:
I’ve also found that the power of these devices really emerges when you use them in serial workflows. By this I mean that you start with some initial MIDI (maybe from a Generator, or maybe not), then process the MIDI with several different transformers.
You can see an example of a serial process in this video, in which I create some rhythmic containers using the Blocks generator, then used the Divs transformer to subdivide those containers to create a new rhythm, then used Feel to dial in the groove. There’s tons of ways to mix and match the devices, which means lots of space to develop your own favorite approaches.
These devices all work with Ableton 12’s new Scales feature. When a scale is enabled on the MIDI clip, the device will only produce notes that are in key. If you disable the scale, then you can work chromatically. The devices are also aware of Live’s themes, so your devices will always match the look and feel of your Live set.
Segment is basically a combination of Divs and Condition Transform. The histogram section at the top, borrowed from Condition Transform, displays the notes in the clip according to their duration. You can select notes by picking specific durations, and then subdivide them with the velocity and pitch functions borrowed from Divs. Quantization and special Division Mode help tame this device’s weirdness when you need that.
Subdivide conditionally based on note duration.Pattern Transform is a multi-function MIDI clip manipulator that is fantastic for creating variations on your ideas. It is probably the most powerful of all of my MIDI Tools. Want to take a beat but just thin it out by removing some of the notes? Or increase the freneticity of the beat by adding more notes? Or create some controlled melodic variation (in key, of course) within the course of a bassline. This device can do all of that, and more.
A multi-function transformer that uses a pattern to choose which notes to modify.Draw is a MIDI clip transformer for Ableton Live. It allows you to change pitch, velocity, and chance super quickly with your mouse. It’s basically a bit like using the mouse in the piano roll or velocity and chance sections of the MIDI clip, but way faster (and a bit less precise…which is a good thing!) I use this thing all the time to create quick variations of MIDI clips for my tracks.
Divs is a transformer for Ableton Live 12 that subdivides notes in your MIDI clips to create ratchets, tuplets, nested rhythms. This device is great for adding decoration or rolls to rhythmic patterns.
Subdivide a list of notes. Designed to be used in conjunction with Blocks to make nested rhythms.Develop reduces or increases the complexity of your MIDI clip over time. Say you have a pattern that you want to “build up” to by just playing fragments of the pattern, then, finally, at the end, the whole thing. Or the opposite – you want to remove an element from the mix, but not by bringing the fader down. Instead, just selectively remove notes each time the pattern loops. That’s what Develop does.
A transformer that can make a pattern gradually appear or fade away.Condition Transform is a multi-function MIDI clip manipulator that helps you create variations on existing MIDI Clips. Like Pattern Transform, it allows you to selectively transform some notes in your MIDI clip while leaving others untouched. Notes are selected based on the note’s pitch, velocity, duration, or chance value. I built this tool to allow me to do ratcheting and subdivision precisely with complex MIDI clips.
A multi function transformer that modifies certain notes according to a rule.Polyrhythm is a multitrack algorithmic sequencer for generating a quick beat or melody. I really like using it with a drum rack to get a beat started. The length of each pattern can be set independently, which makes the rhythms it generates feel a lot less boring and loop-y.
A multi track generator for creating polymetric and polyrhythmic patterns.Turing Machine is a MIDI Tools version of the Music Thing Modular Turing Machine sequencer. Its ingenious design uses a randomness and a 16-bit shift register to generate pitches and rhythmic patterns.
Phase Pattern is a rhythm and melody generator for Ableton Live. Basically, you bend time and that creates a rhythm. Got it? It’s great for “bouncing ball” rhythms like on Monolake’s Toku.
A generator that creates rhythm by bending time.
Blocks is a rhythm generator for Ableton Live that uses proportions to create uneven divisions of the MIDI Clip. You can think of it as an “additive rhythm” or a “proportional rhythm”.
Inspired by Sam Tarekajian and Alex Van Gils’ Nestup, a scripting language for creating nested tuples and other complex rhythmsA generator proportionately divides a clip to make rhythms.
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