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
A lack of galactic space time has forced me to go backwards for the 
I have been busy today working on four or five separate mixes and managed to finalize two of them, maybe. We’ll see how my ears respond after some rest. Anyway, during the last bit of work I was doing I noticed that one of the processor chains was causing insteresting random sounds whenever I pressed stop in 
Now that I have a title for the piece in my last entry, I may as well post a segment from a different layer. This is the main melody. It’s a section of Rhodes Electric Piano that I recorded back in 2005 while testing a live looping technique in 
This segment of percussion is from a new piece I started on today. To get this sound I used a similar filtering technique that I described in