Prismatica

Prismatica is something a bit different.  The easiest way to describe it is an arpeggiator for audio.

The heart of Prismatica is a looper which then sends your loop to four more loopers, grouped in two pairs.  Each of these four loopers has a speed control, so you can adjust the pitch of each loop (1x is normal speed, 2x is double speed, 0.5x is half-speed, -1x is reverse, etc).  But rather than play all four of these loops at once, we have some logic within each group to determine which loop is played.  There's a speed control and a chance control for each of these pairs of loops.  The chance dial controls the likelihood of a switch to the other loop and the speed dial controls how often this decision is made.  A speed setting of 16th notes and a chance setting of 100% means you will flicker between loops A and B every 16th note.  Set the chance down to 25% and there's only a 1 in 4 chance that the loop will change, etc.  It maybe sounds more complicated than it really is.  I think the video will show you exactly what I mean.

There's also a unique preset system in Prismatica.  The four loops' speed settings are stored as presets and there's a Seek knob that allows us to smoothly interpolate between these values, providing very interesting results.  I think there's a lot of potential here both for sound design and just ambient exploration.

I feel this is a somewhat unique idea and I do recommend you watch the video to see exactly how it works.  I hope it brings you some inspiration.  As always, I appreciate you for even reading this far and for the past support of my other devices.  I'm a stay-at-home dad to a very cool toddler and your support is what makes this life possible for me - and I love it.

Video walkthrough here: https://youtu.be/BYApv3Bon2g

Change Log:

v1.1 - I've just released a new update that allows you to save and load loops back into Prismatica. This was inspired by a Youtube comment, noting that when you close your project and re-open it, the audio recorded into Prismatica does not remain. This is true and unfortunately a bit of a drawback with Max4Live or at least the way I'm doing things, but hopefully this update is useful for you! There's a video walking you through the new update here: https://youtu.be/zpufnugb5FA

v1.2 - Fixed a bug introduced in v1.1 where if loading a loop via the Load button, it wouldn't play out of playheads 3 & 4. Also fixed the Base Gain dial - upon loading the device it would show as being turned all the way down but the Base audio would still play.

v1.3 - Major update featuring requests from users of Prismatica!

• Multi outs - You can now send each looper to a different audio track in Live and pan and effect them individually
• Clearer and more musical pitch selection - added more musical intervals as well as labels to describe each one (ie: + m 5th, + 2 Oct, - M 7th, etc) without the user having to do math to find musical intervals
• Explore panel - Seek has been renamed to Morph to better describe what it does and I've also added a Jump dial to snap from one preset to the next, instead of slowly interpolating between the two
• Fixed small issue where the four loopers' gain knobs were not displaying their full dB value
• Changes to automation - removed some duplicate properties which did not need to be recording automation in Live
• Video walkthrough of these changes here: https://youtu.be/tPwsN3-Tsac

v1.31 - Fixed a couple of the colors of the background panels - they were inadvertently changing depending on the theme the user is using.

v1.32 - Changed the behaviour of Prismatica when playback is stopped via Ableton Live's transport panel (ie: playback stopped). Now, all Prismatica's loopers will also stop when this happens and will restart when playback is restarted.