I recenty had the opportunity to take a good long look at Ableton Live’s Arpeggiator MIDI effect. I have used it here and there in the past, but recently discovered how flexible it is. There are many more algorithms (labeled as styles) than I have seen on other arpeggiators (a total of eighteen styles) for a broad variety of patterns. This example uses the “Thumb UpDown” style. Imagine playing a sequence of notes on your right hand starting with your thumb, then index finger, back to thumb, then middle, etc. and that’s kind of what this particular style does to the notes fed into it. Other capabilities of the arpeggiator include a velocity ramp to manipulate the dynamics of the patterns, and typical parameters like retriggering, gate, and groove.
Solar Arpeggio
Tonight I’ve decided to share another of my first few Sony PCM-D50 test recordings. It is simply the sound of filling my bathroom sink partway with cold and then the rest of the way with hot water followed by the much quieter sound of the water draining down the plug hole. These sorts of mundane sounds are especially interesting to me once they have been recorded and taken out their context. Do we ever really listen to the sounds things make while we go about our daily lives? Probably not. And for good reason. If we were distracted by the qualities of the typical sounds in our environments we would never survive as a species. Our hearing is tuned to alert us when we hear irregular or unusual sounds. To my ears, ordinary sounds become extraordinary when I focus on listening to them.
The cellular automata known as the “