Spectranaut

Spectranaut is an ambient playground - a love letter to ambient music.

It's a metaphorical club sandwich of spectral resonators and reverbs, all tied to the global scale mode of Ableton Live 12 - allowing you to turn monophonic material into lush, evolving chords and soundscapes, or re-harmonize polyphonic material.

The device begins with two spectral resonators. Each of these resonators can be set to a specific pitch, or, by pressing the Global Scale button, the device will cycle through notes of the current selected scale at an interval that you choose. The output of these spectral resonators is then fed into a cavernous reverb and its output is then fed into a third spectral resonator, allowing you to blend in a third pitch, or, again, allowing you to activate the scale mode to have a reverb that shifts through notes of your scale at an interval you choose.

New in v1.2, you can now send your own MIDI into Spectranaut to control its three resonators directly. This is done via a new companion device called Beacon, which is included with your download.

The result is moving, evolving soundscapes, drones, choral washes, harmonically rich pads, even drum loops that remain percussive while taking on melodic qualities.

Spectranaut requires Ableton Live 12 and Max 9 - it unfortunately won't work with Live 11, as it doesn't support Max 9. If you've already upgraded to Live 12.2, Ableton has upgraded the internal Max4Live version to 9, so you're good to go. And if you're still on Live 12.0, you'll need to have manually installed Max 9.

I'd also recommend that you have at least an M1 chip if you're on a Mac, or a powerful i7 chip if you're on Windows. This device has a lot going on and it's going to require hardware from the last ~5 years or so.

Change Log

v1.2

• Introducing Beacon - a companion device that sends notes from a MIDI clip to Spectranaut's three spectral resonators
• Adjusted note length options in the global scale mode

v1.1

• Extended note shift intervals to be up to 16 bars
• Extended note slide length to be up to 10s
• Added crossfader control to blend between the two main resonators
• Added two dirt controls to the reverb path (bitcrush and wavefold)