Andreas Wetterberg from The Covert Operators is always sharing wicked Ableton Live tricks. In the video above he shows you how to mangle white noise into something useful.

White noise is both annoying and useful. Here’s why. – Andreas Wetterberg

Watch how he maps the keyboard to the Note Value on the Ableton Resonator plug-in. Good one! Later he tosses together White Noise, Auto Filter, Compressor, Phaser and Autopan into a stew and comes out with some nice scratch effects.

By the way if your looking for a place to grab some white noise don’t forget my post, “Simply Noise. A website with a single purpose.“.

Be sure to check out all of The Covert Operators stuff: www.covops.org

The Covert Operators are Ableton freaks like myself. Their website is full of tips, tricks, videos and free stuff to download. They also offer a few things for sale. Tonight I bought one of their products called Traces 1. Traces 1 is simply 50 Arpeggiator Racks created with different live Midi Devices. I’m constantly looking for ways to break out of my own mind’s repetitive mode especially when it comes to melodies. You know the deal; you sit down to create a new song and all you end up playing is the same four notes you always play!

The first edition of Traces focuses on arps, with 50 Arpeggiator Racks, ranging from simple beat sequences to complex melodies that can be altered in real-time. Combining the Racks with each other delivers even more sequences with literally thousands of combinations to try out. From instant glitch to subtle backgrounds. And how about using several Arpeggiator Racks at once? – www.covops.org

Here an audio sample I put together using Fabfilter’s Twin as the synth, Impulse loaded with GoldBaby’s free Cassette 808 drums and a few Traces 1 arp presets:

Download audio file (Traces_Synth_demo.mp3)

Here’s an audio sample of Impulse loaded with GoldBaby’s free Cassette 808 drums and a few Traces 1 arp presets controlling the actual drum beat (nice!):

Download audio file (Traces_Drum_demo.mp3)

With both the above demos I only have 1 note, 4 bars long laid into a clip. The Traces 1 presets are creating all the movement. It’s true you can make these yourself with some time but even I learned a few things by looking how they put these together. By the way here is a related post I did about using an arp on drums: click here

Traces 1 is 7:50€. link