BJ Campbell
1 min readNov 6, 2018

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Your track is beautiful.

You could replicate a very similar system using follow triggers on clips in Ableton Live. It doesn’t give you full Markov Chain control, but you can hack your way into something similar.

Something I did on a track a while back, which turned out beautifully, is I played a guitar riff over a beat, cut the riff up into quantized samples, loaded the samples into a midi rack in Ableton, and then told Ableton to play them in order. Then I used a MIDI randomizer effect, which would trigger with a certain probability, and would replace one of the samples with a different sample several steps in either direction of the origin sample. The result, after mucking about with attack, decay, and some effects, was a continuous, never ending, never replicating guitar solo riff. It was beautiful. I can listen to it for hours.

I used it in a song. Starts around 2:00:

Everytime I play the song back in Ableton the guitar part is different, yet similar.

And it sounds a tiny bit like Aphex Twin too.

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BJ Campbell
BJ Campbell

Written by BJ Campbell

Conscientious objector to the culture war. I think a lot. mirror: www.freakoutery.com writer at: www.opensourcedefense.org beggar at: www.patreon.com/bjcampbell

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