monolake: Grains, Space and Step Sequencers in Max for Live
Thirteen devices, 189,663 downloads between them, and almost all of them uploaded on a single day in March 2010. The monolake catalogue is small, old, and unusually coherent: nearly every device is about one of three things — turning audio into grains, placing a sound somewhere in space, or driving parameters from a step sequencer. There is no synth-of-the-month churn here. These are tools that came out of a working practice and got published more or less as they were.
The through-line: grains, distance, and sequenced modulation
Group the devices by what problem they solve and the picture gets clear fast.
- Granular processing. Grain.Freeze, Granulator and Granulator II all cut incoming or sampled audio into short overlapping sections and rebuild it as a continuous stream.
- Spatial placement. Circular Doppler and Distance both treat a sound as an object with a position relative to a listener, and derive volume, filtering and stereo behaviour from that position rather than from separate unrelated knobs.
- Modulation and sequencing. PX-18, Step.Modulator, Modulator and LFO Zero are all about generating control data — steps, notes, curves — that is locked to the transport.
- Practical studio and installation utilities. Exhibition.Master, Exhibition.Slave and Black exist because a specific job needed doing.
The common thread across all four groups is reproducibility. Circular Doppler explicitly syncs the movement of both the source and the virtual microphones to song position, and the description makes the point directly: it allows 100% reproducible effects. LFO Zero gained a song-time synced reset in May 2011. Modulator draws beat-synced modulation on a step grid. These are not random-mod devices; they are devices designed so that playing the same section twice gives you the same result. That matters if you are building a track you will later have to perform, or an installation that has to run unattended.
One practical note before anything else: these were built for Live 8.1 and Max 5.1.8, with the exception of Granulator II, which lists Live 9.0.1 and Max 6.1. Expect to do some checking on a modern Live version. Three of them — LFO Zero, Modulator and Granulator — were uploaded by Clint/synnack with monolake's permission, which is worth knowing if you are tracing provenance.
Grain.Freeze is the one to try first
Grain.Freeze is the most downloaded device in the set by a wide margin — 68,843 downloads, 5/5, 22 comments, and the only one here that got a version 2.0 update, in May 2011. If you want a single-device introduction to this catalogue, it is this one. It is a granular audio freezer: hold a moment of incoming audio and let it sustain as texture.
Note that it is filed as a MIDI Effect. That is not an error to work around, it is the point — freezing is a performance action, and putting it under MIDI control means you can trigger it from a clip or a pad instead of reaching for a mouse.
What to route into it:
- A percussion bus, frozen on the tail of a hit, so a drum decay becomes a pad that outlasts the bar.
- A vocal or spoken-word channel, frozen on a vowel, for held drones that still carry the timbre of the voice.
- A resonant synth line, frozen mid-phrase, then handed to a filter or reverb further down the chain.
Put it on a return rather than in-line the first time. Freezing on a send lets the dry part keep moving while the frozen layer hangs underneath it, which is usually what you actually want.
Distance and Circular Doppler: one knob, many consequences
Distance is the quietest good idea in the catalogue. Its main control is a single big distance parameter, and moving it affects volume, filtering, pan and stereo width together. With the right settings it simulates a source receding out of earshot. 11,415 downloads and a 5/5 rating, but only one comment — it has been used far more than it has been talked about.
This is the device to reach for when an arrangement has too many elements at the same apparent depth. Rather than automating four parameters per track and hoping they add up, you automate one and the relationships stay musically sensible. Try it on secondary layers — a doubled hi-hat, a counter-melody, a reverb return's input — and push them back instead of turning them down.
Circular Doppler takes the same spatial thinking and adds motion: two virtual microphones rotate around a single sound source, with Doppler delays, distance-dependent amplitude modulation and filtering. 50,728 downloads, 5/5. Because source and microphone movement follow song position, a rotation can be tied to a bar count and it will land in the same place every pass. That makes it usable as a structural device — a sound that orbits once per eight bars — rather than just a smear effect.
Used together, the pair covers static and moving placement. Distance decides where something sits; Circular Doppler decides how it travels.
Sequencers: PX-18 and the modulation family
PX-18 is the historical piece. According to its description it was written by monolake and Gerhard Behles around 1995, developed further until around 2001, and used to sequence more or less all rhythmical Monolake tracks from 1996 to 2002 — with the description also stating that a lot of inspiration for how Ableton Live handles Clips and Scenes came out of that experience. It carries a 5/5 rating from 6,545 downloads. Even setting the history aside, it is a step sequencer with a very particular workflow, and it is worth loading just to feel how different a sequencer designed for one artist's music can be.
Around it sit three modulation tools:
- Modulator — draw beat-synced modulation of a parameter on a step grid, with a smoothing algorithm. 10,007 downloads, 4/5. Use it where automation lanes are too fiddly: filter cutoff per sixteenth, send level per step.
- LFO Zero — described as a general-purpose LFO with sample and hold of waveforms, smoothing, and the song-time synced reset added in May 2011. The same description mentions LFO One, where up to three oscillators can modulate each other for complex waves, described as a kind of modular LFO synth. 22,085 downloads and no rating yet, which makes it the most used unrated device in the set.
- Step.Modulator — a MIDI device that transforms incoming notes through a step-sequencer interface. 3,683 downloads, 5/5. This one changes notes rather than parameters, so it belongs before an instrument in the chain, not on a return.
The smoothing in both Modulator and LFO Zero is the detail that makes them usable on continuous parameters. Stepped modulation on a filter usually clicks; smoothed stepped modulation gives you shaped movement that still lands on the grid.
Granulator, and which version to load
Granulator is a synthesizer built on quasi-synchronous granular synthesis: a constant stream of short crossfading sections of a source sample, with pitch, position and volume of each grain modulatable in many ways, plus two multimode filters. It has 9,821 downloads — and a 1/5 rating, which sits oddly against everything else in this catalogue. Granulator II, added March 2013 for Live 9.0.1 and Max 6.1, carries the same description of the granular engine and a 4/5 rating, but only 5 downloads recorded here.
If you are on a recent Live, Granulator II is the version whose stated requirements are less ancient. Either way, treat it as a sampler where the sample is raw material rather than a sound: load a single sustained note, a field recording, or a bounced chord, and modulate grain position slowly to get movement that no wavetable produces.
The utilities nobody talks about
Exhibition.Master and Exhibition.Slave were built for an installation project. The master starts Live's transport at a given time of day, fades in the audio of its chain or track, fades out at a specified later point, and stops transport. The slave only makes sense alongside it. With 1,574 and 929 downloads respectively, these are the least-used devices in the set — but if you have ever had to make a Live set run a gallery room on a daily schedule, this is exactly the pair you wanted.
Black is the most modest device here and, at 5/5 from 4,025 downloads, clearly appreciated. It displays song time in hours:minutes:seconds, as long as the tempo is constant, and it blacks out the computer screen so you can listen without looking. The description frames it as a solution to not being able to turn off an external display. Long-form listening and mix checks are the obvious use; so is any situation where a bright screen is in the audience's eye line.
A suggested path in
Start with Grain.Freeze on a send — highest downloads, 5/5, the most immediate results. Then add Distance to two or three background elements and listen to how much room it opens up in front of them. From there, pick by need: Circular Doppler if you want repeatable motion, LFO Zero or Modulator if your automation lanes are getting unmanageable, Granulator II if you want to build sounds out of samples rather than oscillators.
Licensing varies and is worth checking before you publish anything derived from these: Grain.Freeze, LFO Zero and Modulator are Attribution-ShareAlike, the Granulators are Attribution-NonCommercial, and the rest list no license. Browse the wider catalogue from the best-rated devices or the guides if you want modern alternatives to sit alongside these.