LiveSet · the instrument
Samples, sequencers and scenes
LiveSet is a rack of instruments, and you play them. Drop a sound in and it is under your fingers straight away. Sequence it two ways, arrange it into scenes, and launch the whole thing from a controller while it stays editable underneath you.
Start from a sample
Loading a sound
Drop a .wav, .flac or .mp3 onto the window and you have a sample track. It plays chromatically across the keyboard, or you drop it into a sequencer and build a pattern. There is no import step to sit through: the sound is playable the moment it lands.
Drop → track
amen_break.wav → sample track
↳ plays chromatically across the keys
↳ or drop into the step sequencer
↳ or slice it and lay it out
The step sequencer
The step grid
Everything a rhythm needs to breathe lives on the step, where your hand already is.
Parameter locks
Lock an effect parameter to a single step, so one hit opens the filter or throws a delay while the rest stay put.
Ratchets
Retrigger a step two, three or four times inside its own slot for rolls and stutters.
Trig conditions
Fire a step only sometimes, every other bar, one time in four, so a loop never quite repeats.
Polymeter
Give a track its own step count. A seven-step line against a sixteen-step kick drifts and re-meets on its own clock.
Micro-timing
Nudge a step off the grid by a hair to push or drag the feel, per step.
Live step-record
Arm and play the pattern in as it runs. Steps land where you tap them.
The piano-roll
The piano roll
For lines and chords there is a full piano-roll. Draw notes against a scale, audition as you go, and shape each note on its own.
Scales and scale-lock
Pick a scale and the roll snaps to it. With scale-lock on, every note you draw stays in key.
Velocity lane
A dedicated lane under the roll for shaping dynamics across a phrase.
Per-note detail
Each note carries its own velocity, pan, pitch in cents, glide and probability.
Arpeggiator and chords
A built-in arpeggiator and a chord generator turn a single held note into a moving line or a full voicing.
Drums
Per-hit parameters
Drum sequencing gives each sample its own effect chain, so the kick, the clap and the hats are shaped apart from one another. A euclidean generator spreads a number of hits evenly across the bar when you want a pattern to start itself.
A drum track, roughly
kick · sample → saturator → glue
clap · sample → reverb → gate
hats · sample → filter → auto-pan
↳ euclidean fill: 5 hits over 16 steps
What a track can be
Sixteen kinds of source
In most live software a track is a clip slot or a plugin. Here a track's source is one of sixteen kinds, and they sit at the same level: a Euclidean pulse generator is as much a track as a sampler or a plugin, and swaps for one without rebuilding the arrangement.
OneShot
A sample triggered to play once.
Loop
A sample looped, either synced to the master clock or running free.
LongSample
A long pre-rendered piece, set intro, set outro, atmosphere. Plays once, end to end.
Slicer
Splits a sample into equal-length slices. Each pad in the 16-pad grid plays one.
StepSeq
A fixed-grid step sequencer.
Euclidean
k pulses spread over n steps, with a MIDI note and velocity.
NotePad
A 16-pad grid where each pad is a scale degree.
NoteClip
A free-length polyphonic note clip: a piano roll of any length.
DrumKit
A note-mapped drum machine: each pad maps one MIDI note to a sample.
Synth
The built-in voice.
Clap
A CLAP plugin.
Vst
A VST3 plugin, resolved by the host's scanner.
ExternalMidi
An external MIDI input port with a channel filter.
AudioIn
An external audio input.
AudioClipTimeline
A sample-accurate editable timeline of trimmed audio slices.
HybridResidualEventTimeline
A deterministic stochastic-event lane that carries no imported sample.
In the piano roll
Generators
The chord generator writes twelve families as root-position close voicings, with extensions stacked on top, and the arpeggiator lays what you have into one of seven patterns. Both write real notes into the clip, so you can switch them off and still have the part, and every note is yours to drag afterwards.
The random pattern is seeded. So a take you liked comes back the same instead of turning into a different idea the second time you play it.
Arpeggiator patterns
- Up
- Root, third, fifth, up the chord.
- Down
- The same, reversed.
- Up-down
- Up to the top and back to the root, without repeating the turn.
- Down-up
- Down to the bottom and back up.
- Random
- Shuffled, and seeded, so a take repeats.
- As played
- Source order preserved.
- Chord
- All notes together.
Arrange it live
Patterns, slots and scenes
A pattern paired with an instrument goes into a slot. Slots gather into a scene. You launch scenes live, and they land in time.
Launch quantisation keeps every change musical: a scene waits for the next bar by default, or for a beat, half-bar, or up to eight bars, down to an exact moment when you want it.
Scenes can carry a BPM override and glide the tempo over a number of bars. A scene can also chain to the next one a set number of bars later, so a passage moves on hands-free while you work the rest of the rig.
When the set is built, a setlist holds it in order. The format is portable, so the whole set travels to the venue on a USB stick.
Three activities, three jobs
Compose · make the music
Prepare · ready it for the stage
Perform · play it
Launch quantisation
off · beat · half-bar · bar · 2 · 4 · 8 · exact
Scene chain
scene 3 → fire scene 4 after 16 bars
Time-stretch
Warping
Samples and loops are warped with WSOLA: a pitch-preserving overlap-add stretch. Take a 124 BPM loop and play it at 132, keeping its pitch, with no pre-rendering and no bounce to disk first.
It happens as the loop plays, so you can move the tempo of the whole set and every warped track comes with you.
Where it stands
Launching the set
Two things this does not do yet. The one-shot sampler is monophonic: retrigger a sample and it restarts the single voice instead of stacking a new one, and a polyphonic voice pool is designed but not built. And there is no self-performing song mode: scenes are launched by you, on the beat you choose, from your controller. That is deliberate. LiveSet is a live instrument, so it waits for your hands and never plays the set for you.