The Covert Operators

Dug up from our old archives, we bring you the MusicBox Rack. This Rack is a Round-Robin sequencer. You can program up to 16 steps that are consecutively played by triggering C1. This means you can play a whole sequence with a single note. The Rack has been used in the past for things like playing melodies from drum pads, foot pedals and buttons.

- Click here to download the Rack

This is a M4L tutorial on how to store, load and morph a list of values.
The pattr and pattrstorage objects may seem daunting to newcomers to the Max world, but those objects are very useful for managing data like multiple presets that you wish to store with your set.

I have an example device that allows you to work with the values of a multislider object and lets you store those values with your Live Set.
The multislider object is a Max object without special support for Max for Live, therefore it doesn't remember values like M4L objects such as live.dial and live.numbox do.

- Click here to download the Multislider Pattrstorage Example device

If you are familiar with Max, this example may be all you need to get started. But for the newcomers or in case you need a refresher, let me show you how to set up your own preset system.

Hi all, I was working on a device chain, and came up with this little trick. I've made a device chain that automatically morphs between a shrill 1/8th delay and a mid-range 3/16th delay - in time with the mooosic.

What are dummy clips?

Dummy clips are either audio clips that do not send any audio or MIDI clips that don't send out any notes. The only thing that dummy clips do, is modulating the effects or instruments in the track.

I am of course talking about ... Noise!

You want a swoopy sweep, or a synth crash, or just a simple hihat. Where would you turn? Many synths have white noise samples, but they're just that: Very short samples that need to be looped, which makes them sound fake and periodic.

Here's roughly 20 seconds of white noise.

- Done properly. By politely asking an expensive synth to produce it. You can easily plop this sample in everywhere you need white noise, and it should fit the bill. 

In this closing part on the AMS files, we'll see how we can draw waveforms and we'll hear some sound examples.

The Covert Operators recently released a small free pack that contains 3 sets of AMS files that will be useful to experiment with. You can download it here.

In this part we will have a look at the code and what you can do with it. AMS files are plain text documents with the .ams extension instead of the .txt extension. Each line of code is a command for the decoder inside Ableton Live that translates these text documents into samples. Some commands are better left unchanged, other commands are used to transmit values of specific parameters.

When Ableton started the public beta test for Live 6, we learned about a new audio file format called "Ableton Meta Sound" or ".ams". This article used to start with a link to the Live 6 beta section on the Ableton forum, but since that has vanished, these 3 articles are the most detailed info you will find on this subject anywhere.