Max for Live Device - Spike 1.0
I’ve recently come across a wonderful Max for Live device that injected a serious dose of inspiration in one of my latest tracks. Spike 1.0 by jsm is setup to be used as a MIDI device that generates randomized grace note gestures. I’ve always been fascinated by Max for Live devices that help jumpstart or expand upon creativity. Especially, when at times, I feel kinda stuck with writer’s block. Usually though, when I do, I hit up MaxForLive.com and do a basic inquiry on MIDI devices that I haven’t yet added to my collection.
That’s how I came across Spike 1.0. Immediately as I dragged it into a new MIDI track, I knew that this device was one of quality. I say that because in my experience, whenever I grab a new device from MaxForLive.com, I find that either descriptions of that said device is either inadequate or lacks proper documentation on how it’s intended to function. However, in the case of Spike 1.0, the creator did a phenomenal job at providing descriptions for each knob or slider inside of Ableton’s Info View.
A view of the description for one of the functions in Spike.
Let’s go over what Spike 1.0 does & how it can help you in your musical productions. Spike 1.0 comes equipped with a Chance knob that ranges from 0 to 100. The lower the setting, the lower chance & vice versa. To the right of that knob, is a clickable box that allows you to pass through or block incoming MIDI notes. In my usage, I didn’t really utilized this because in order to trigger Spike 1.0, MIDI notes must be placed in the track with Spike 1.0 in order to generate random grace notes.
After that we have Speed, in which it can be set to milliseconds for a bit of a loose feel or quantized to a rate which is more aligned to a grid. Reps, is what gives Spike 1.0 that generative feel of pumping out randomized notes. You can see a more detailed description in the image above. The last slider is Acceleration, which at first I found myself wondering what the difference is with Speed. However, using accel, the user can “speed up” or “slow down” the rate at which gestures come in.
What I found useful, was mapping those three slides to my Evolution UC-33 and proceeded to manipulate those sliders as I launched MIDI clips. Some of the results were wild and then some were to wild to control. That’s how I began to think of the next step in pairing this device with a sidekick. I dropped Ableton’s native MIDI device for Scale right after Spike 1.0. This helped with keeping what I was generating in key. I further explored the gestures being created by focusing on audio fx to help boost the creativity process even further. I added Ableton’s Delay & AutoPan after the signal chain.
A view of my signal flow using Spike 1.0 followed by Scale, then Operator with Delay & AutoPan.
During one of my sessions, I recorded a brief tutorial to help jumpstart content for my Youtube & Instragram pages. Which to be honest, have severely lacked any type of content for quite sometime. In these videos, I provide the example I illustrated above without the feature of the Evolution UC-33. Hope you find this Max for Live device interesting and helpful in your own musical journey! ~slpcyc