SHAPES

You can use these directly to add “shaped” modulation to any parameter in Live. Each Shaper can modulate up to eight parameters with its custom curvature. Think of them as LFOs, but instead of just basic sine or triangle waves, etc., you can apply any arbitrary shape you want. To save you time, these fun & interesting shapes have been pre-formulated for you to use in production immediately.

‘Shapes’ come in four varieties, “Pulses”, “Rises”, “Sawblades” and “Silhouettes”.
The first three categories are more utilitarian; head to “Silhouettes” for the most fun stuff…!

Designed to implement numerical intervals that mathematically divide up a measure of time.
Example: Need an effect to pulse in every third thirteenth? Well here you go.
Includes Shapers for thirty-six unique pulse intervals ranging from half to sixteenth.

Designed to add drama and flair to parameters by ramping them up over time in various ways.

Shaper – Active Radiation
A pulsing rhythmic pattern that halves itself in length with every other repetition as it builds, acting like a stereotypical EDM build right before the drop.

Shaper – Climbing
Alternates building and dropping, gradually making it to the top before the final plunge.

Shaper – Delayed Gratification
Hesitates a bit before committing.

Shaper – Drill Down
Acts with a quickening, descending spiral pattern.

Shaper – Electrical Surge
Acts like a bolt of jagged electricity surging from below, replete with random variation applied to the particular pathway taken each time.

Shaper – Rising Flames
Meant to act as a crackling conflagration.

Shaper – Rising Spikes
Comprised of a field of spikes, of two different heights, looming up at you. The smaller ones are bit more pokey.

Shaper – Rising Tide
Emulates waves on the ocean front getting successively higher.

Shaper – Running Late
Finally catches up at the last moment.

Shaper – Swelling
Undulates upward in swelling humps.

Shaper – Up and Away
Follows a nice smooth upward climb, followed by a fluttering quick descent after mingling with the clouds for a brief span.

Shaper – Yeah No
Feels like it’s gonna get there, but it fails to satisfy at the final conclusion.

Five Shaper presets based upon patterns of actual physical sawblades from real life (you know, for cutting wood and stuff).
Includes:

Shaper – Sawblade Crown Tooth

Shaper – Sawblade Double Tooth

Shaper – Sawblade Reverse Skip Tooth

Shaper – Sawblade Skip Tooth

Shaper – Sawblade Standard Tooth

Shapes that mimic the outlines of physical things from real life, plus some miscellaneous useful contours.
Includes:

Shaper – 4 On The
Timed to emphasize the rhythm that a dance kick drum typically plays. To change it so that it acts more like rock or hip-hop style drumming, set the loop length to 1 bar instead of half a bar.

Shaper – Backbeat
Timed to emphasize the “backbeat” rhythm that a snare typically plays.

Shaper – City Skyline
Based on a famous city skyline. Which city? It happens to be Los Angeles, California, USA. Why? The flat roofs make for a nicely rhythmic resulting pattern…

Shaper – Dolphin
Shaped like an aquatic mammal with a well-developed sense of hearing. Or is it a ’50s muscle car…?

Shaper – Drill
Acts with a quickening spiral pattern.

Shaper – Fire
Meant to act as a crackling conflagration.

Shaper – Half Life
A pulsing rhythmic pattern that halves itself in length with every other repetition, acting like a stereotypical EDM build right before the drop.

Shaper – Heart
Looks like a heart that alternates between the upper and lower halves to form a continuous pattern. It is a happy coincidence that the two bumps at the top sound reminiscent of a pulsing heartbeat.

Shaper – Jittle
A combination of the words “little” and “jitter”, and that’s what this one provides: a little bit of jitter.
Think of the Value Shift knob as your new parameter control, superceding the original control — only this time with a little jitter.

Shaper – Lightning Bolt
Acts like a bolt of jagged lightning striking from above, replete with random variation applied to the particular pathway taken each time.

Shaper – Logo
A crude homage to the Ableton logo; as close as could be gotten with the limitations of a line drawing that can’t double back on itself.

Shaper – Long Haul
Based on a semi truck tractor unit (aka lorry).

Shaper – Moai
Generates an endless procession of monoliths from Easter island, each weathered over the decades by the fate of nature in slightly different ways.

Shaper – Opera House
Based on the profile of a famously distinctive Opera House in Australia.

Shaper – Placid Lake
Emulates the calm and serene ripple on the surface of a placid lake on a lightly windy day.
Think of the Value Shift knob as your new parameter control, superceding the original control– only this time with a little bit of wave ripple.

Shaper – Spike Field
Comprised of a field of spikes, of two different heights. The smaller ones are bit more pokey. Don’t fall in!

Shaper – Squiggle
It squiggles down, it squiggles up, it squiggles all about. It’s kinda like a sinewave within a sinewave?

Shaper – Stormy Seas
Emulates frenetic rippling on the surface of the ocean on a stormy night.
Think of the Value Shift knob as your new parameter control, superceding the original control– only this time with a heavy dose of chaotic wave ripple.

Shaper – Tetrads
Includes the profile of shapes that are strategically fitted together in a classic “falling brick” video game.

Shaper – Transient Click
Provides a quick-sliced transient click, plain and simple. Map it to the volume control of something to see what we’re talking about.

SHAPES – AUDIO EFFECTS RACKS

A versatile set of tools to modulate audio.These racks utilize the complex and varied shapes in the pack to create a wide range of effects from subtle textural modifications to dramatic transformations.

Pulse — Instant Industrial Distortion
Drones become textural rhythmic pulses. Basses bounce harder. Drums get dynamic grit. Three independent lines interact for pulsating character.

Spike Field — Buzzy Distortion
A slightly subtle, slightly unstable, simply warm overdrive. Loves bass, and bass loves this back.

City Skyline – Cinematic Crackling Tape Reverb
Crackle or not, give your sound a little lo-fi charm with this distorted reverb.

Fire — Shimmer Reverb
An expansive, expanding effect that is everything a shimmer reverb should be. Adds beautiful dimension to pads, especially when the various pitches are modulated slowly in and out.

Long Haul — Multi-voiced Resonant Reverb
A reverb that’s more than meets the ear. This not only adds spatial depth to your sound, but generates tone of its own. Mysterious and characterful.

Swelling — Pulsating Reverb
Blurs the line between delay and reverb almost as much as it blurs the audio you run through it.

Backbeat — Instant Groove Delay
A shadowy doppleganger follows you, stepping in time to your pace. The aim here is to build a wall of sound that is rhytmically-oriented. Dirty if need be, just crank the Drive knob.

Drill Down — Moving Delay
Departing from the same station, but taking diverging tracks. Your sound is multiplied and then caressed into increasingly distinct stereo images.

Jittle — Unstable Mod Delay
Less of a delay, more of a harmonization generator, in the sense that it resonates and warps your signal to such a degree that what comes back through the delay is more like a cousin twice removed than a twin.

Moai — Shifting Delay
Ping-ponging copies bounce into their own private echo chambers. Wriggling, bounding, energetic, charming.

Playground Slide — Dark vs Light Delay
Two delays for the price of one! Distinct styles that give your sound twice the character. Creates enough atmosphere that you can carry a whole track with a single track that has this in its chain.

Pulse — Gate Delay
Grimy, grissled copies sputter in rhythmic jolts. If workign alone, crank the Gate AMT, else keep it low for subtlety. To multiply pulses, just dial in some DelAMT.

Rising Spikes – Dynamic Envelope Delay
Wide, bouncing delaya pounce forth from your signal. In busy material, makes things busier. In simple material, melts into the background until the audio stops, then this carries on as a haunting glimpse at what once was.

Sawblade Standard Tooth — Looping Clock Delay
Play one note or chord per bar and send this to your drummer. They’ll know what to do. Instant groove machine.

Shark — Swung Octave Delay
Your audio triggers squirelly, bouncing melodies that float on top of the dry signal. Shape the Attack envelope with swells.

Electrical Surge — Ambient Tape Cloud
Add subtle lo-fi charm with this characterful, wide modulation.

Placid Lake — Subtle Haunting Lo-Fi
A-B anything through this and tell me you don’t prefer a little of this aplied to the signal 🙂

Squiggle — Modulated Stereo Modbox
All the modulation tools you need in one convenient kit. You don’t need to apply them all to a signal, but thanks to the added squiggly motion, you can without getting drabbed or overhwhelmed.

Up and Away — Swelling Pitch Shifts
Shimmer effect that inflates any signal put through it. Take a simple one-note drone and hear it float away into the clouds.

Opera House — Harbor Waves Noise
Gentle shore waves to build a backdrop to your piece. Your audio passes in and comes back out with envirnoment.

Pulse — Sequenced Resonator

Rising Tide — Rising Beat Repeat

INSTRUMENT RACKS

These Instrument Racks are expertly crafted to offer a wide range of sonic textures, from evolving ambient landscapes to dynamic rhythmic patterns and deep bass tones.Each rack is meticulously designed to respond expressively to user input, allowing for nuanced control and the exploration of diverse musical ideas, making them ideal for composers and producers seeking to add unique and emotive elements to their music.

4 on the — Velocity-Expressive Night Signal
Best paired with a velocity sensitive MIDI controller, but barring that pull up the velocity rand knob. Let this be the follower to your track’s energy’s lead, or establish an emotional arc as you feel out the varying timbres.
The pulse is your anchor like a Gatsby light across the lake.

Electrical Surge — Multi-variant Warm Tonesynth
Play varying positions of the Env. Shape knob against itself for maximum impact — staccato jolts interspersed by sustained, sizzly synth swells.

Sand Dunes — Moment in Time
Still your breath to imprint this point in time. Moments distilled from moments. Now exhale, blowing holes through this whispy cloud about your feet, your feat to have just noticed.
Hold small chords as long as you’ll allow yourself to.

Serpinskish – Blade Runner Texture
Left to it’s own devices here in this dystopia, your momentum will knock out it’s own rhythm. Buried under others’, you’ll push out wide adhesive. Who might those shadowy figures stuck among it all?
Take your time, you have nowhere else to be.

Climbing — Alien Engine Rev
Put your foot to the pedal to the metal for a growling quasar engine that can barely hold itself together. Fun to press and hold, but don’t dismiss short percussive stabs forvariable percussion layers!

Tetrads — Long Held Bass
Smooth synth bass meets geometric edges. Hold out monophonic notes for a bar to let the modulation do the rhythmic work, but let quicker, meandering fills escape up a few octaves every few passes. Then tug everything into a breakdown with the Macro Filter and smooth out the filter modulation for a contrasting rolling sound.

Delayed Gratification — Distant Howler Mystery
Good things come to those who wait. Keep things under cloak until those choice moments to latter up octaves. If that resonance peeks it’s head out more than every few bars, you might be off the path.
Excellent chance for discreet key presses to make friends with smooth, now-and-again Aggression turns.

Pyramids — Endlessly Harmonic Drone
Topples over itself, it’s hard to recognize how shapely this all is. Release often, press softly, and keep that Rate dial turning, and Pyramids will start to speak.

Sawblade Crown Tooth — Two-sided pad_s pad
Bubbling up underneath. If it’s gold or grit is up to how you play it, and what you take is from all of that.

Yeah No – Swelling Depthful Organism
And so where do you want to go? This is about limits, and you’re setting them. Denying them. Pressing waves against themselves and to the ground unless you want them to leap all spring-y.

Active Radiation — Ramping Sweet Grit
Laser treatment, though not quite surgery. This is an analysis — bag this data.

Drill — Uncertain Mallets
For your signal to reach that hidden stranger, you must make a chance on a direction, press the pulse, release, and wait. Wait. Wait. And repeat if you can’t decipher a response amongst your fading lingering.
Tap out longer words if you must, but make them at least halfway intelligible.

Rising Flame — Cloudy Marimba Bell
Harsh bell, nightmare music box, but soft enough skin to pass for what it isn’t. Ghost emitting, tonal percussion. Darker the key, closer the Carpenter.

Stormy Seas — Playful Banter synth
Waves rocking vessels, vessels jittering over rocks. Not all predictable how your requests will be responded to, but patiently take what may and sail that way. You’ll find some mooring in soft.

Lightning Bolt — Rapid Gallop Arp
One hand on your notes, one hand on Arp Gate, sifting for pebbles. When you find it, hold it, and then only subtle shifting from there until you’re told otherwise.

Logo — Pulsing Delay Synth
Aim your strikes for the logo ridges, and don’t mind the added groove as you miss. Eventually, you’ll want to turn to holding, and shift Timbre when you do.

Running Late — Elseworld Descending Build
A season’s long bloom. What other messages can you decipher along the Arp scroll? Less is more, and Frequency lets you emit the least.
There’s a track’s worth of timbres here, if you’re careful how you morph between them — when in doubt, Ground Swell is your no-brainer transitioning solution.

Sawblade Double Tooth — Poking Saw Rhythms
Pops and sparkles captured at high frame rate. You can’t avoid a lopsided rhythm, but I recommend determining this yourself with uneven keyboard stabs — what falls in the gate is of its own mind. The bursts might not always align properly, but celebrate when they do.

Sawblade Skip Tooth — Multi-Timbral Rhythmic Discovery
Machines repurposed to translate our message. Come out scratchy, round, or not at all. Just keep the dials rotating til you’ve found serenditious Euclid.