Did you know that most American’s eat sushi the wrong way? Many of my friends put the ginger slices on the sushi or sashimi itself. Your actually supposed to eat a piece of ginger in between different sushi bites to cleanse your palette. Sometimes this concept is good for audio too!

In between songs the placement of a random melody, FM radio chatter or even an orchestra tuning up can make the song that follows have more impact, more color. Many great albums use this technique of course. As an example Depeche Mode inserts snippets of chants or synth drones often between songs.

Random adds an element of the unknown to the otherwise commonplace pitch parameter. The Chance control denes the likelihood that an incoming note’s pitch will be changed by a random value. You can think of it as being something like a dry/wet control for randomness. – Ableton Live User Manual

Because my own music styles range from electro all the way to hardcore on my first album Manic Panic I put actual answering machine messages I received in between songs. Today I use Ambrosia’s Wiretap Studio to record snippets of audio from weird things I find on Youtube. You will hear some of my findings on my next album for sure.

Here’s a quick example of something you could create as a pallete cleanser. Grab a vintage drum machine loop. I used a loop I got free from Rhythminmind.net. Next I put on Fabfilter’s Twin, turned up the Noise generator and put Ableton’s Random Midi Effect before it:

Download audio file (Cleanse.mp3)

Photo credit: rouan and jm3