Iftah Gabbi, “the artist formerly known as “iftah from skinnerbox,” has built a Max for Live acid line generation tool called Sting. It’s free – and guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Everyone needs this now and then – it’s not just inspiration; it’s like melodic anti-depressant. And there is a surprising range of settings here to tweak. If atonal melodic patterns are more your speed than acid, this does that, too. Plus this generates interesting contours you can map to other devices (like effects), provided they respond to pitch input.
And it’s just hella great. I’ll let Herr Gabbai show this:
Here’s Iftah’s description:
i first came up with the idea for “sting” 10 years ago during a residency in reykjavik. it started like half a joke as in “can i program something that can generate acid lines” and turned out to be a great musical tool and super popular device. since then it saw several iterations that were made public, except of this version which i was using on stage during the final years of skinnerbox. “sting 2022” allows you to generate anything from atonal to acid lines and fluidly morph between them. you can also transpose the root note via midi, offset the sequence and do other neat things. free download, link in bio.
Features:
- Click the smiley to generate a new sequence
- Density morphs between 16 variations oft the sequence
- Type morphs between 16 tonal and atonal variations
- Root defines the root pitch of the scale
- MIDI defines the root based on incoming MIDI
Genius. Check it – free as in beer:
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/8357/sting-by-iftah-a-really-nice-acid-line-generator
Side note… I’m interested, too, to retune this to something other than 12-TET, for some non-temperered acid. (Iftah’s own free Microtuner can do that in Live, though as I suggest in that article it’s great to pair Microtuner or a tool of choice with Leimma so you learn a bit about the tunings you’re using in context; I have some other resources in that story.)
Enjoy!