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Ornamenter: Dynammic Echo Generator for Ableton Live MIDI Clips

ORNAMENTER

Echo-Driven Ear Candy

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Ornamenter is an Ableton Live Extension that generates echo-ornamented variations of MIDI clips. For every note in a source clip, it builds a cascade of echo repetitions trailing behind the original, with pitch, length, and velocity each compounding across the sequence according to rules you set independently. The result is the original melodic and rhythmic content gaining harmonic depth and movement, not through a static effect, but through new MIDI notes you can see, edit, and build on. Ornamenter writes to a single clip or to several selected clips at once, with each source generating its own independent output, and multiple Iterations available to explore variation possibilities.


ECHO-DRIVEN ARTIFACTING

  • Builds an echo sequence behind every note that passes the Chance gate, spacing each echo one Rate interval after the last
  • Compounds Pitch, Velocity, and Length cumulatively across the sequence: a Pitch Base of +2 semitones makes echo 1 land at +2, echo 2 at +4, echo 3 at +6, while a Velocity Base of 50% halves the volume each step
  • Ends a sequence automatically once velocity reaches zero, so decaying echoes always fade to silence rather than cutting off abruptly regardless of the Repeats ceiling
  • Caps every sequence at a hard Repeats ceiling, while letting Feedback mode, Density thinning, or bounding constraints end any individual sequence earlier
  • Generates up to 64 independently randomised variations from one source clip, or one output per clip when run across a multi-clip selection

The compounding behaviour is the single idea that makes Ornamenter sound like an instrument decaying naturally rather than a delay effect bolted onto MIDI. Because each echo inherits and then modifies the previous echo's properties, rather than each echo applying the same fixed offset independently, the sequence has a real arc: the third echo isn't just "the base value again," it's the base value applied three times in a row. That's also why Velocity automatically terminates a sequence at zero. A decaying echo train that just stops mid-fade because Repeats ran out would sound wrong; ending exactly where the math says the sound has died is what makes the cutoff inaudible.

Keeping Chance and Density as two separate rolls, rather than one probability that does both jobs, is what lets you describe two genuinely different textures independently: how many notes get ornamented at all, versus how complete each ornament sounds once it starts. Collapsing them into a single control would make those two musical decisions fight each other instead of compose.

Bounding pitch with Clip, Wrap, or Fold rather than a single hard clamp exists because a cumulative system needs more than one way to handle drift. A melodic line with a steadily rising Pitch Base will eventually run off the top of any reasonable range, and simply clamping it there (Clip) sounds very different from reflecting it back down (Fold) or wrapping it to the bottom (Wrap). Offering all three turns a side effect of compounding, the need to eventually do something at a boundary, into a deliberate compositional choice instead of a limitation to work around
POWERFUL PROBABILITY

  • Chance is a per-note gate: one roll per note decides whether that note gets any echo sequence at all
  • Density is a per-echo gate inside an active sequence: each echo gets its own roll, and a skipped echo doesn't cancel the ones that follow
  • Combining low Density with high Chance produces sequences that always start but feel organically thinned out; combining low Chance with high Density produces full dense sequences on some notes and silence on others
  • Phrase mode truncates an echo sequence the moment any other note in the clip starts, keeping melodic material clean and non-overlapping
  • Note mode lets a sequence run until the same pitch repeats, allowing echoes from different notes to layer over each other for denser harmonic textures
  • Chord mode treats notes sharing a beat position as one unit with a shared Chance roll and synchronised timing, preserving voicings intact through the echo sequence
  • Free mode processes every note independently regardless of shared beat position, letting chord notes drift apart in timing and outcome for a more complex texture
Tool Tip Annotated
Learn all you need to know directly in Live - just click the [?] icon in the Extension and hover your mouse over any parameter.
Scale Aware
Natively integrated with Live 12's scale and key for seamless workflow.
Already comes included in:
Extensions Bundle 001 · Ultra Bundle

Requires:
Ableton Live Suite 12.4.5 or above.
Not available in Live Standard, Intro, or Lite.

EXTENSION
Melodic · Rhythmic · Transformation · Generator