Here's a little trick to let Live generate a random melody for you. It's not sofisticated but take is a start to build up your own generator. I use it on one track while recording on another one (midi). Afterwards the recorded piece is cut up and only interesting pieces are kept.
One thing that's missing is that all notes have the same length. So if anyone has a solution for this one, I'd be interested. I know there are VSTs out there that can generate random midi patterns, but I wanted to generate a Live device only effect. It's also a nice illustration of how the live midi effects work and the power of them (imho).
Cheers!
Here you can see the midi effect chain link
Here you can download the midi effect chain link
Here's an explanation of the construction and how to use it...
- Create a clip with all C's with max velocity on all 8ths or 16ths or ... You can do C's to, you can create every patern you like actually, but all same notes make distribution more uniform (I guess).
- Insert 'Random' midi effect to change the C's into random notes. Playing with choices and scale gives your random melody a different range.
- Insert 'Scale' midi effect to make the randomness a bit more predictable regarding melody. We want it to be more or less musical right.
- Insert 'Velocity' midi effect. See picture for settings. Goal is here to make the velocity of every note completely random.
- Insert another 'Velocity' midi effect. See picture for settings. Trick here is the Lowest input range setting. If you make this one different then 0-127 it will filter out some notes. This in combination with the previous Velocity effect removes some of the 8ths, 16ths from our clip. Now we have a random rhythm too! And it has random dynamics (due to previous step).
- Problem now is we filtered out a range of notes. So lets put these back in using another 'Velocity' midi effect. Now we have the rhythm pattern with all posible velocities.
- I also inserted a last 'Velocity' midi effect to adjust the dynamic range of the pattern.
A few tips to control the randomness?
- Change Random Choices and Scale
- Choose a scale (according to your song of course).
- Change the 'lowest input' from the second Velocity effect to make the rhythm sparser/fuller.
- Play with the last 'Velocity' midi effect to change the dynamics.
Extensions?
- Add a 'Chord' and 'Arpeggiator' before the 'Scale' effect to make the melody more predictive. Notes with musical intervals
Random melody generator... Are you out of inspiration?
I quite enjoy making drums, percussion, and bass tracks, loading them up with lots of sample clips, and letting follow actions randomize everything so you've always got a drum, percussion, & bass part, but every permutation and combination becomes possible.
I've come up with some really useful (and useless!) stuff using this.
I've come up with some really useful (and useless!) stuff using this.
Yeah, I did a post on this technique once too... linkshambone1 wrote:I quite enjoy making drums, percussion, and bass tracks, loading them up with lots of sample clips, and letting follow actions randomize everything so you've always got a drum, percussion, & bass part, but every permutation and combination becomes possible.
I've come up with some really useful (and useless!) stuff using this.
But actually you can use the above midi technique too using impulse or a drum vsti. You just need to tweak the range so you get drum hits.