The Covert Seq – Creating patterns and Presets from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo.

The Covert Operators and Bjorn Vayner have become my favorite go-to source for wild Ableton Live hacks. And even before the release of Max for Live, Bjorn has built some terrific, simple step-sequencers using Live’s Racks feature. That’s just the Racks feature – no Max patches or hidden features anywhere to be found. Sure, I suppose the clip view itself can be seen as a kind of step sequencer, but this gives you a unique way of generating sequences.

If you just want to begin playing with step sequencing in Live, Bjorn has a new download, aptly called The Covert Sequencer, as seen in the video at top. It’s free, it’s fun, it celebrates the 5th Anniversary of Covert Ops and the 10th of Ableton Live (good grief!), and it’s all voodoo built with dummy clips and MIDI effects.

Full post, downloads, and video tutorials:
The Covert Seq [The Covert Operators]

If you want to try your hand at the ninja skills behind all of this, Bjorn posted a screencast back in August revealing his secrets:

The last few days have brought still more Live tutorials to help hone your Live ninja skills. This time, both focus on racks.

Vocal manipulation with Ableton Simplers. from wiretotheear on Vimeo.

Oliver Chesler of the currently on-fire wire to the ear shares this tutorial using Live’s Device Groups and built-in Simpler. Basically, the idea is to rack Simplers together so you have easy access to different slices. Because these racks can easily map MIDI to different rack slots, there’s quite a lot you could do with this technique.

Oliver ultimately works his magic by manipulating the patterns in Arrange View. You have a couple of options here if you want to work live. You could simply bounce some of those manipulations that would be hard to play back into a slot in Session View. Or, if you want to stay in Session View (the one with the clips), you could try doing more extensive MIDI mappings with the Rack, and use patterns in clips in place of Arrange View.

Need to brush up on the basics of slicing and drum racks first? The good folks of Infrasonik are back with another 101 tutorial: