Tombola Sequencer by joelpowell: Physics as a MIDI Source
A tombola is a rotating drum full of bouncing balls. Tombola Sequencer by joelpowell takes that idea literally: you play MIDI notes into the device, each note becomes a ball inside a rotating shape, and every time a ball hits a wall the note fires. There is no grid, no step length and no pattern. There is a simulation, and the rhythm is whatever falls out of it.
The device holds up to 64 notes at once and exposes the four controls from the OP-1's tombola: Speed, Mass (which governs bounciness), Gravity and Shape. All four can be automated in Live, which is the detail that turns this from a novelty into a usable instrument.
How the four parameters change the output
Because the sequence is emergent rather than programmed, the only way to "write" a part is to learn what each control does to the density and feel of the result.
- Speed sets how fast the container rotates. It is the closest thing to a tempo control, but it changes which balls reach which walls, not just how often.
- Mass controls bounciness. Low mass gives a more settled, clustered behaviour; high bounce scatters notes further apart in time.
- Gravity decides how hard the balls fall back toward the floor of the shape. Drop it and the notes drift; raise it and they pile up at the bottom edge, retriggering more often.
- Shape changes the geometry of the container, which changes where collisions happen and therefore the whole rhythmic signature.
The practical consequence: two automation lanes are usually enough to compose a full arrangement. Gravity and Speed over eight bars will take a part from sparse to busy without you touching a note.
Set your buffer size before you judge it
The device is built on Max's physics engine and its timing depends on frame rate. joelpowell is explicit about this: use a low audio buffer size in Live's preferences so the simulation runs at a high frame rate. If you audition Tombola at a 1024-sample buffer on a laptop with a dozen plugins already loaded, you are not hearing the device, you are hearing a stuttering simulation.
There is one known quirk, also documented by the author: at extreme speeds, balls can occasionally escape the container. That is a limitation of jit.phys rather than a bug in the patch, and the author has openly invited solutions in the comments. In practice it means the far end of the Speed range is for destructive moments, not for parts you need to survive a 40-minute set.
Three ways to put it to work
1. Generative plucks that stay in key
Put Tombola on a MIDI track with a short plucked synth. Play in a seven- or eight-note voicing — say a Dorian spread across two octaves — so the balls are all harmonically safe. Set Gravity high and Speed moderate so you get a steady patter, then chain Live's stock Scale after Tombola as a safety net and Velocity with a wide random range after that. The author designed the device to be combined with Live's own MIDI effects this way, and it is genuinely where the device sounds best: Tombola decides when, the stock devices decide how hard and what pitch.
Then record the output. Arm a second MIDI track, set its input to the Tombola track, and capture four or eight bars. You now have a MIDI clip you can quantise, edit and loop — the simulation becomes a sketching tool rather than something you have to run live.
2. Percussion that fills itself
Route Tombola into a Drum Rack. Feed it five or six notes that map to hats, rims, shakers and one low tom. Keep the pad count low — 64 balls into a drum rack is noise, six balls is a groove. Automate Gravity in the Arrangement so the last two bars before a drop get denser, and automate Shape at the drop itself for a hard rhythmic cut. Because collisions are physical, the fills never repeat identically, which is exactly what you want from a hat pattern that runs for six minutes.
3. A live performance lane
In Session View, map Speed and Gravity to two knobs on your controller and leave Mass alone. Drop notes in during the set from a keyboard — each new note is a new ball, so the part thickens as you play. This is the use case the OP-1 original is loved for, and it survives the transfer to Live intact. Just keep the buffer low and keep Speed out of the escape zone.
Where it sits among comparable MIDI effects
Tombola sits in a band of MIDI effects with around 20,000 downloads each, but almost nothing in that band does the same job.
Stepper by dric is the closest functional neighbour and the clearest contrast: a step sequencer and LFO hybrid with up to 16 steps, per-step waveforms, and controls for speed, step count, depth and offset. Stepper is deterministic — you know what step 7 will do. Tombola is the opposite proposition. If you want a repeatable modulation shape you can trust in an arrangement, use Stepper; if you want surprise, use Tombola. Many producers end up with both.
MotionMod by zealtv shares the "modulation from a non-musical source" idea, except the source is a webcam and your own movement rather than a physics engine. It sits at 4/5 across 20,901 downloads and dates back to Live 8, so expect an older feel; there is a fuller look at it in the MotionMod deep dive.
CC map by veedjee solves an entirely different problem — bidirectional CC control of outboard hardware with MIDI learn — but it is worth knowing about if you intend to send Tombola's output to a hardware synth and want the rest of that rig mapped properly. The CC map deep dive covers the setup.
Humanizer rounds out the group, though the author states on the page that it has been superseded by Group Humanizer. Mention it only because timing variation is a natural companion to generative sequencing — but Tombola already produces irregular timing by design, so stacking a humanizer on top rarely helps.
What 20,377 downloads and a perfect rating actually tell you
Tombola was added in June 2022 and last updated that September. Reaching 20,377 downloads from a 2022 start is a faster climb than the alternatives above, several of which have had a decade to accumulate theirs. A 5/5 rating with 19 comments is a small but consistent sample — enough to say the device does what it claims, not enough to call it exhaustively stress-tested.
The version number has stayed at 1.0 since the September 2022 update, which cuts both ways. It suggests a finished, stable patch rather than an abandoned one — but if the ball-escape behaviour bothers you, there is no evidence a fix is coming. The requirements are Live 11.1.5 and Max 8.2.2, so Live 10 users are out. No license is specified on the page, which is worth noting if you plan to build on the patch or use it in something you distribute.
Who should skip it
Skip Tombola if you work at a high buffer size by necessity — large template sessions, heavy plugin loads, anything where you cannot drop to a low buffer without crackling. The device's timing is tied to frame rate and it will not behave.
Skip it if your writing process depends on repeatable parts. Semi-random is the entire point, and fighting that is wasted effort; Stepper or Live's own sequencing tools will serve you better.
And skip it if you want a generator that handles harmony for you. Tombola fires the notes you put in, in an order it decides. Chord logic, scale correction and velocity shaping all have to come from devices downstream. For producers who already think that way — Tombola plus Scale plus Velocity plus a Drum Rack — it is one of the more rewarding free MIDI effects to come out in the Live 11 era. For ideas on what else to pair it with, the MIDI generators roundup is a good next stop.