Making Generative Music in Ableton Live, Making Messy Melodies

So, now that you’ve got a good, repetitive note coming through, you’ve got to find some way to modulate it into a melody. Well do that with two different MIDI effects.

The first will be the Random effect which will modulate any given MIDI note up or down at a predetermined rate. The effect has controls to regulate the range of this change as well as how random the change is. The problem with using this effect in isolation, though, is that the results will not be in any given scale; they’ll just sound cacophonous.

This is where the Scale effect can help. This effect effectively forces any incoming MIDI note into a scale. You can decide if you want that scale to be major or minor or some other crazy scale I’ve never heard of. All you have to do is chain these two effects together in the same track as the seed we discussed last post and, voila, tonal, generative melodies.  I would advise playing with the controls on the random effect to see how they affect the final product. 

Next up, well discuss what kind of MIDI instruments are well suited to generative music. See you then!