pp: Eight Devices From the First Years of Max for Live
Eight devices, 65,797 downloads, and nearly all of them published between December 2009 and August 2011. The catalogue entry for pp is a snapshot of Max for Live's first eighteen months: a period when the obvious gaps in Live's toolset were still wide open and a single patcher could fill one in a weekend. What makes the collection worth revisiting is not nostalgia. It's that the gaps pp went after — modulation sources, step sequencing with more than four lanes, grain pitch control, delay networks — are still the gaps producers work around today.
The through-line: modulation and control, not sound design for its own sake
Look at the eight devices together and a pattern appears. Six of them exist to drive something else. gLeechFOs is a bank of LFOs that maps to Live parameters. Anti-lope turns incoming audio into a parameter modulator. BeatGenSeq-Mod and StepSeq-FloatMod generate and sequence MIDI. Even the two audio effects that do make noise — JG.Delays and Boardulator — are built around processes that beg to be modulated.
The second pattern is honesty about sources. pp's descriptions name names. BeatGenSeq-Mod is described as a modification of a Manuel Poletti device from the Max for Live tutorial set. StepSeq-FloatMod is described as a modification of the factory Step Sequencer. gLeechFOs is credited to Gregory Taylor's LFO Tutorial series, with the description offering "deepest, humblest apologies and THANKS." Boardulator leans on John Gibson's jg.granulate~ external, and the description says plainly: "I just did the questio…" — the sentence is cut off in the listing, but the posture is clear. pp built on top of other people's work and said so every time.
That matters practically, not just ethically. It tells you these devices are extensions of patterns you may already half-know. If you've ever opened the factory Step Sequencer and wished it had more lanes, StepSeq-FloatMod is literally that wish, implemented.
Where to start: gLeechFOs
gLeechFOs is the entry point. It's an audio effect at 11,979 downloads with a 5/5 rating, described as an LFO utility device with four LFOs plus one more, Live parameter modulation mappings, and OSC broadcasting. The listing also mentions a companion, "Leecher," a wavetable glitcher at version 0.9, bundled with the same update.
The reason to start here is that an LFO bank changes how you use everything else in the set. Drop it on a return or an unused audio track, map the LFOs to filter cutoff on one channel, send amount on another, and a dry arrangement starts breathing without you drawing a single automation lane. The OSC broadcasting is the unusual part — it means the same LFO shapes can leave Live entirely and drive whatever else is on the network. If you run visuals or a second machine alongside your set, that's a reason to pick this over a modulation device that stays inside Live.
Version 1.0.1 was the last update, in May 2011, built against Live 8.2.2 and Max 5.1.8. Check it against your current install before you build a show around it.
Anti-lope: the other half of the modulation pair
pp's own description calls Anti-lope "sort of an adjunct" to gLeechFOs, and that's exactly how to treat it. Where gLeechFOs generates motion from nothing, Anti-lope derives motion from audio: an envelope follower with shaping controls that converts into a parameter modulator with scaling controls. Full documentation is included in the device, which was still standard practice in 2010 and is rarer now than it should be.
Concrete uses: feed it a kick and scale the output to duck a pad's volume or open a reverb's dry/wet on every hit. Feed it a vocal and drive a delay's feedback so the tail only grows when the singer is loud. The scaling controls are the part that makes this usable rather than a toy — raw envelope data mapped straight to a parameter almost always moves too far or not far enough.
Anti-lope sits at 3,977 downloads and 4/5, with twelve comments. It was never updated past version 0.9 and the listed compatibility is Live 8.1.1, making it the oldest-targeting device in the set. Audition it carefully.
BeatGenSeq-Mod and StepSeq-FloatMod: two takes on sequencing
These are the two MIDI effects, and they represent very different levels of finish.
BeatGenSeq-Mod is pp's most downloaded device at 17,080, rated 5/5 across twelve comments, and it's the one to try first if you sequence drums. The description calls it a beat generator and sequencer in one — a rhythm generator and a step sequencer combined into a single instrument. Version 1.2 added an "auto-Dice" feature; version 1.4.1 brought "many new functions, tidier code." The shipped version is 1.4.4, from June 2010.
The generate-plus-sequence combination is the useful bit. A pure generator gives you ideas you can't edit; a pure step sequencer gives you an empty grid and a staring contest. Having dice-roll generation feeding a grid you can then fix by hand is the workflow most drum-programming devices eventually converge on. Route it into a Drum Rack and let auto-Dice run while you audition kits.
StepSeq-FloatMod is smaller and more specific: the factory Step Sequencer with eight sequences instead of four, plus a floating edit window with transparency options. pp's own description is frank that the 0.9.1 update "turns this patch into a proper device, as opposed to the experiment / thing-of-interest it was previously." At 3,776 downloads and a 3/5 rating — the lowest in the set — it's the one to approach with the most caution. But the floating window idea is genuinely good for performance: you can keep the grid visible while you work elsewhere in Live, which is a problem the device view has never solved. (jonasobermueller's devices take a similar approach to floating UI, if that's the part you're after.)
JG.Delays and Boardulator: the audio side
JG.Delays is the second-most downloaded device here at 16,372, rated 4/5, with nineteen comments — the most discussion of anything in pp's catalogue. The listing describes version 2 as old features bettered plus new ones. It's licensed Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, and it was updated as late as May 2011 against Live 8.2.2 and Max 5.1.8, making it one of the better-maintained items here.
Boardulator is the granulator, at 8,305 downloads and 5/5. Its stated focus is pitch-transposition of grains, built on John Gibson's jg.granulate~. One caveat from the description: it used to be OSX only, with experimental Windows support described as "hopefully coming soon" as of the February 2011 update at version 0.9.4. Windows users should read the comments before downloading.
Pair Boardulator with gLeechFOs and you get the obvious move: LFO the grain transposition rather than setting it. That's the kind of combination pp's catalogue is designed for — the modulators and the processors came from the same hands and expect each other.
The two instruments
Last are the seasonal pair. late-autumn arrived in April 2011 at version 1.0, has 2,605 downloads and a 5/5 rating from two comments. early-winter followed in May 2011, with an August 2011 update to version 1.1 that the description says fixed "small bug in synth engine." It's the newest device in the catalogue, the only one with no rating yet, and at 1,703 downloads the least-travelled.
Both listings are short on detail, so there's little to say beyond the fact that early-winter has a synth engine and that these are pp's only instruments. If you've worked through the modulation devices and want to hear what the same builder does when making sound from scratch, they're there.
A practical order of operations
- gLeechFOs — install first, map it to three parameters in a current project, and see whether the LFO bank earns a permanent slot.
- BeatGenSeq-Mod — the highest-rated, most-downloaded thing here; let auto-Dice generate and then edit by hand.
- JG.Delays — nineteen comments' worth of community vetting and an updated version 2.
- Anti-lope — once gLeechFOs is in the set, add audio-derived modulation alongside it.
- Boardulator — if you're on macOS; check comments first if you're not.
- late-autumn, early-winter, StepSeq-FloatMod — the deeper cuts.
The whole set targets Live 8 and Max 5. Nothing here has been updated since 2011, so treat every download as an audition rather than an install. Some Max for Live devices from that era still load fine; others don't. The ideas, though, have aged well — which is why BeatGenSeq-Mod and JG.Delays have moved more than 33,000 copies between them. If you want more modulation-source options to compare against, the best-of lists and the MIDI transformation roundup cover newer ground.