MutationStation

A randomiser that touches everything is a novelty. What turns it into a writing tool is being able to say which parts are already right.

MutationStation uses the lock system Elektron sequencers made famous. Click a note to pin it and every generator leaves it alone: pitch, rhythm, octave, length, accent and slide all move around it. Lock the root and the turnaround, re-roll the rest as often as you like, and the phrase keeps its shape while the detail keeps changing.

Auto-Lock picks those notes for you. Structural weighs seven signals together: recurrence, metric weight, accent, bar openers, note length, low register and isolation. When you want one signal to decide instead, rank by downbeats, offbeats, accents, long notes, low notes, recurrence, or the phrase corners that hold a bar together.

Or mutate one stretch and leave the rest alone. Drag along the bar/beat ruler above the roll to mark a range. The marked bars shade, a Range chip names them in the tool row, and from that moment every mutation device only reshapes what is inside it. Move any slider and the bars outside come through exactly as they were. Click the chip or press Esc to unmark. Membership is by where a note starts, so a note that begins before the mark and rings into it belongs to the part you did not mark.

Every roll runs on seeded dice, so the take you liked is the take you get back, and you can re-roll one panel at a time while the rest stays put.

34 pitch strategies, from the simple (Random, Proximity, Root/Fifth) to measured acid and techno voices like Acid Trip, Hypno Root, Seventh Anchor, Lead Line and Offbeat Anchor. Many are measured from real bass and synth loops, so they move the way basslines actually move rather than like a random-note generator. One amount decides how much of the line they are allowed to rewrite, and a scale, root and range decide where the new notes may land.

Slides and accents the way a 303 does them. Octave, Accent and Slide each get their own amount, their own step pattern and their own lock, so you can hold the accents you have and re-roll only the glides, or pin the octave jumps and let everything else move. Connect Notes fills the gaps between them with passing tones, in scale or chromatic.

↓ Rhythm Import takes the timing of whatever clip Ableton is showing and lands it in the roll as a monophonic line on the root note: a rhythm nobody typed in, sitting there ready for every mutation panel to write a line onto. Click a clip in Live, press the button, and the groove of your drums is now the groove of your bassline.

It works on audio clips, not only MIDI ones. Live's scripting cannot hand an app the audio, so MutationStation reads the sample off disk, decodes it, and finds the attacks itself, by spectral flux: how much the spectrum grew from one frame to the next, which is what an attack actually is. That is why it finds a kick sitting under a held pad, where plain loudness barely moves but the spectrum does. Hit strength becomes velocity, so the accents survive the trip.

A warped clip is read through its own warp map, so the hits land on the grid you are looking at rather than where they fell in the raw file, and only the region Live actually plays is analysed. Hits snap to the roll's current grid. WAV, AIFF, MP3, FLAC and M4A. On a MIDI clip a chord counts as one hit, at the velocity of its loudest note, and deactivated notes are ignored.