Hotrod your Ableton Live sessions with still more Max for Live freebies. From J74 aka Fabrizio Poce comes a chord generator, phase vocoder, and stereo chorus for free, plus a lot more updates if you spend a few bucks on the packs.

All those tools and toys for Max for Live do make a case for tricking out your Ableton Live rig – and either springing for the Suite edition or a standalone Max for Live license. These ones look really nice – especially the phase vocoder – all derived from some of the other J74 sets for manipulating pitch, playing melodies and harmonies, and processing sound. It’s notable the chord explorer is also playable and sequenceable and the vocoder and chorus go into some slightly different sonic territory than the built-in options. Specs from the dev:

J74 ChordExplorerLight [MIDI]

– Chord-set harmonically constructed from a selected scale
– 35 Chords (diatonic to the scale)
– MIDI mappable
– MIDI sequentiable [sic]
– Derived from the J74 Progressive/J74 Bassline toolset

J74-PhaseVoCoder [Instrument/AudioFX]

– Eight voice Phase Vocoder with built in filter, LFO/spread and Drive
– Derived from the J74 PitchControl toolset

J74 Eighty-Four-Chorus [AudioFX]

– Stereo Chorus effect inspired by 80s synths
– Derived from the J74 Venus6 toolset

http://fabriziopoce.com/FreeCode.html

Venus6 by the way is a full-blown polyphonic synth built in Max for Live; PitchControl and Progressive/Bassline are what they sound like. J74 is worth checking out – it’s long been some of the deepest and most interesting work in Max for Live, including morphing and sequencing and harmonic tools that work unlike anything else.

Plus a bunch of the paid devices now support high-resolution display and zoom / 150% – which is great for some of us, as I’ve lost a bit of vision and need that zoom for sure.

That set:

  • Progressive
  • BassLine
  • Venus6   
  • StepLocker
  • SliceShuffler
  • PitchControl

Free and paid, everything is here:

http://fabriziopoce.com/download.html

The M4L choices are many, so sound off in comments if you have favorites among these or others I may have missed! There’s so much stuff, I’m often careful not to go too crazy just for fear of being overwhelmed, so I’m sure I have skipped over some good stuff in the process.

Let’s see, if Germany can watch the 1960s UK sketch “Dinner for One” each year for Silvester, I can use this as an excuse to replay this tradition:

No one needs a vocoder / drum machines have some soul / actually I am just checking my email…