LFO Zero by Monolake: Sample and Hold, Smoothing, Song Reset
LFO Zero is a general purpose LFO built by monolake and posted to the library in May 2011. It has been downloaded 22,085 times and has never been updated past version 1.0. That combination — heavy use, no revisions in well over a decade — tells you most of what you need to know about its character. It does a small number of things, it has done them the same way since the day it was uploaded, and a lot of people kept it.
What the device actually provides
Three features are named in the author's own description: sample and hold of waveforms, a smoothing algorithm, and a songtime-synced reset function that was added in May 2011, shortly before the upload. That is the whole stated feature set. There is no changelog beyond that, no 1.1, no later port.
One thing worth flagging before you download: the listing text also describes LFO One, a separate design where up to three oscillators modulate each other to build complex waves — "some kind of modular LFO synth," as the description puts it. That paragraph sits in the same blurb but describes a different device, so don't go in expecting three cross-modulating oscillators from LFO Zero itself. What is promised here is a single, well-behaved LFO with stepped and smoothed output and a reset tied to song position.
The upload itself came from Clint/synnack, with monolake's permission by email. The license is Attribution-ShareAlike, which matters more than usual for a device this old: you are allowed to open the patch, change it, and redistribute your version under the same terms, as long as you credit the original. For an unmaintained Max 5 device, that is the difference between a dead end and a starting point.
Songtime reset is the feature to build around
Most LFOs in a MIDI effect chain free-run. You hit play, the oscillator is wherever it happens to be, and the modulation lands differently on every pass. For dub techno and for anything where you bounce stems repeatedly, that is a real problem: the filter sweep that made take three good is gone by take four.
A songtime-synced reset fixes that. The LFO's phase is anchored to the transport position rather than to when you pressed play, so the modulation is the same whether you start from bar 1 or drop the playhead at bar 49. Practical consequences:
- Stem exports match each other, because every pass through a section produces identical modulation.
- You can audition an arrangement from the middle without losing the shape the section was built around.
- Slow LFOs — the eight- and sixteen-bar kind that make a track breathe — become usable, because you no longer have to play from the top to hear them in the right place.
If you have been avoiding very slow modulation because it never lands twice the same way, this is the reason to try the device.
Three ways to put it to work
Stepped filter movement on a synth line. Put LFO Zero at the top of a MIDI track's device chain, ahead of the instrument, and use sample and hold to generate stepped values. Aim those at a filter cutoff or a resonance on the instrument below. Sample and hold gives you the jumpy, pseudo-random stepping that a plain sine or triangle cannot, and because the reset is tied to song position, the "random" steps repeat identically every time the section comes around. That is the useful kind of random: unpredictable to the listener, deterministic for you.
Smoothing to turn steps into glide. Run the same sample-and-hold output through the smoothing algorithm and the staircase becomes a curve that still has the irregular rhythm of the steps underneath it. Point that at a send level, a delay feedback, or a pan position on a pad and you get movement that never quite repeats within a bar but resolves cleanly at the loop point. Two instances — one stepped and hard, one smoothed and slow — on the same track covers a lot of ground.
Live performance with scene jumps. In a Session View set where you are launching clips and moving between sections, free-running LFOs drift out of relationship with each other over a long set. With song-position reset, several instances across several tracks stay in a fixed phase relationship, so a sixteen-bar sweep on the bass and a four-bar one on the hats keep lining up the way they did in the studio.
Where it sits among MIDI effects of similar reach
Four devices sit within about 1,500 downloads of LFO Zero, and each solves a different part of the modulation problem.
MK16-185 Sequencer by Kapetan (22,113 downloads, 4/5, 47 comments) is a stage-controlled step sequencer descended from Nico Starke's ML-185. Choose it when you want explicit, hand-set values per stage and control over stage length. LFO Zero's sample and hold gives you steps without letting you dictate what each step is; the MK16 is the opposite trade. There is a longer look at it if that is the direction you need.
Architect by pmonet (22,361 downloads, 5/5) is about drawn shapes — modulation curves you define by hand rather than pick from a waveform list. If your problem is "I know exactly the contour I want and no LFO shape matches it," that is the device. Note the author's own posted plan to rewrite it as an audio effect, which tells you something about the limits of the MIDI-effect format for modulation work. We covered it separately.
MotionMod by zealtv (20,901 downloads, 4/5) takes a different input entirely: camera motion detection, built from Andrew Benson's Hold Still and Zlatko's peakmod. It is a performance tool, not a timing tool, and it is from the same Live 8 / Max 5 era as LFO Zero.
CC map8 by veedjee (20,581 downloads, 5/5) is the one to reach for when the target is outside Live: bidirectional CC control of hardware, with MIDI learn and track I/O setup. LFO Zero's description makes no claim about sending CC to external gear, so if hardware is the destination, start there instead.
What 22,000 downloads and no rating suggest
LFO Zero has no rating at all, despite seven comments and fifteen years of availability. Its neighbours all carry scores — 4/5, 5/5, 4/5, 5/5. The absence is not a bad sign so much as an information gap: older uploads accumulated downloads during a period when rating was less common, and nobody went back.
So you are judging on two things. The download count is real and large, which says the device delivered for a lot of people. Against that, the listing targets Live 8.2.2 and Max 5.1.8 and has never been revised. If you are on a current Live, treat the first load as a test rather than a commitment — open it on a scratch track and confirm it behaves before you build an arrangement on it. If you want a device the crowd has already vouched for in a modern Live, Architect and CC map8 both carry 5/5 and were built for Live 9 and Max 6. The current MIDI effect roundup has more in that vein.
Who should skip it
Skip LFO Zero if you need per-step control over modulation values — that is a sequencer job. Skip it if your modulation has to reach hardware over MIDI CC, because nothing in the description promises that. Skip it if you are unwilling to troubleshoot a Max 5-era patch, or if you need a device with an active maintainer behind it; version 1.0 from 2011 is the end of the line unless you take the ShareAlike license up on its offer and fork it yourself.
Download it if the specific thing you want is an LFO whose phase is locked to song position, with sample and hold and smoothing on the output. That is a narrow brief, and this device was written to it.