Generate Random Melodies in Ableton

The other day I was watching this great video on a little-known YouTube channel called Little Ambient Machine.

The video was showcasing a small eurorack synthesizer system which specialized in being used as a generative ambient synthesizer and at the core of the note generation was a module by Vermona called the Melodicer. (Non-affiliate link to it on Perfect Circuit)

The Melodicer is a stochastic pattern generator that uses probability to generate melodies and rhythms and is a super fun module but costs $450 USD. Not only do I not have the funds to buy something like that now, but all of my synthesizers are wired into my DAW so having a similar solution within Ableton Live was more my speed.

I loved the idea of this concept of note generation and thought to myself, “hey, I can probably build this or something close to it in Ableton Live.” So I did. And thus the Melodizer was born. This is a free MIDI effect rack which you can add to any MIDI track in Ableton Live and can be used to trigger any software or hardware MIDI devices.

This doesn’t work in quite the same way as the Vermona Melodicer, though in spirit it fulfills a relatively similar goal which is to generate random melodies. Instead of the probability sliders found on the Vermona counterpart, the Melodizer has knobs which effect velocity instead.

You can check out the full details in the video above or else download below. (Note that it requires the Ableton Live 11 Suite)