Noah Pred has a fantastic free treat out on Manifest Audio for Ableton Live and Max for Live. Percotone is monophonic, expressive, playable, and full of tonal, pitch-mangling delights. It’s just the thing for sneaking in some quick sound experiments in the waning days of the year.
Percotone is simple, but a few knobs unlock a full spectrum of noises and forms. You can even use this as a melodic monosynth, despite all that talk of percussion. And that’s relevant, because Percotone is already built with Live 12 feature integration (scale awareness) and fully optimized to run on Push controllers or Push standalone. (Tweak away – everything is Info View Annotated!)
The basic idea here is you start with a basic sine wave, then add frequency modulation and pitch controls. But that’s a lot – this gives you a percussive voice with a ton of options:
- Harmonic control (and even/all toggle)
- Pitch targeting (for subtle portamento-style pitch envelopes or extreme modulation)
- Scale awareness, targeting not just the played pitch but also target pitch and transient pitch
- Two-stage envelope with velocity scaling
- Transient parameter, for choosing how much of that pitch and filter envelope is applied to the beginning of each played note (for some snappiness)
- FM and tuning with coarse/fine control
- Noise oscillator
- Multimode filter (LP, HP, BP, notch) with transient toggle
- Dedicated highpass filter
- Tuning deviation
- Gain, pan, master tune
Here’s a quick first jam with it, adding some of Noah’s LFO, delay, and reverb, too – both sounds are Percotone.
The Live theme is INF gTron from DeafMan.
Go get that download:
https://manifest.audio/percotone
There are a bunch of other free tools where that came from (the LFO I was using is from a free pack):
And I was playing around with X-Torsion and X-Verb, which are truly one-of-a-kind effects from the X-FX bundle.
And thanks, Noah! Happy Maxmas to those who celebrate. (And as it’s after sundown in a lot of the world, happy Hanukkah for those marking that.) Going through more of these devices through the next days so – guten Rutsch to Noah and the Max community!
We’ve got a lot more great Max for Live action to cover before 2024 is done so – don’t touch that dial. Or do. Never mind.