less concepts uses elementary cellular automata (CA) to scan sets of notes and determine which ones to play + when, by iterating a seed value through a set of simple rules.
[olafur] mode: inspired by the self-playing pianos of Olafur Arnalds, [olafur] will bypass the chosen scale and will build note pools from direct keyboard input. just arm the track and play a chord.
[laurie] mode: inspired by Music Mouse by Laurie Spiegel, [laurie] will add chord voicings to your bit streams. choose a gating bit and enable ‘1’ ‘2’ or ‘3’ for unique harmonies.
five text-based meta sequencers: using a built-in set of text operators, sequence/modulate/randomize all parameters to extend expressivity.
you can use a lot of Live’s MIDI effects to extend the device – here are some of my faves:
Note Length : less_concepts has a fixed length of 100ms. place this device after it to get longer notes!
Velocity : less_concepts has a fixed velocity. place this device after it to open its range – I particularly like the Dynamic II preset with a bit of Random and the Low at 45.
Random : place this device after less_concepts to randomly transpose the sequence. really useful with Choices @ 1, Scale @ 12, Chance @ whatever! change Sign to taste – for piano VSTs, Bi is priiiiiimo
Chord : when using [olafur] mode, place this device ahead of less_concepts to key in a wider range of notes with a simple chord shape. what’s cool about [olafur] mode is that it doesn’t re-order your input, so the order in which you press + hold notes actually changes the note sequence!
plz ask q’s, plz share artifacts here (+ feel free to share publicly if you make a thing you wanna share), plz have fun!
Not sure if I’m missing something here but when I add less concepts to a midi track on Ableton 10 set the rules based off the doc to get started, less concepts is not sending midi out. After I set the settings I have run the transport
I’m not really an ableton person, but figured I would grab the demo now that they extended the trial period. [less concepts] makes me worry I might have to go in
This is great fun, thanks @dan_derks, I love composing with the meta sequencers, fits my tracker brain very well.
maybe, but it sure is special. this sounds fantastic, thank you so much for sharing it.
i’m really finding that multiple instances opens things up in ways that I hadn’t previously experienced – here’s a take with two pianos (Spitfire’s OPW):
each piano has an instance of less concepts with their own rule/seed combos
both are set in [olafur] mode, receiving the same super basic chord shapes
both are in a chord -> less concepts -> velocity -> note length -> VST sandwich
ah! the meta seq doesn’t parse stacked commands like v1_bit: 2, v2_bit: 9, seed: 40 – they need to be on separate lines.
but if you want those three commands to execute at once, you could write them each as the top line of the first, second and third sequencers (line breaks are also valid and are executed as rests):
1
2
3
v1_bit: 2
v2_bit: 9
seed: 40
v2_bit: 1
seed: 20
gbl_oct: 3
gbl_oct: 1
and then set the divisor on each to read at the same rate.
OH DUH, i should maybe add a “sync” function where all of them can be reset to step 1 and crawl down the line.
OH ALSO, i’ll add this thing i really liked but took out for some reason where you can tell another sequencer which line to read from – so you can sequence a sequencer (with a sequencer that’s maybe being sequenced by it!).
I realized after I asked that this was probably the answer. Would be nice to have all the information in one spot but this is definitely a workable solution, thank you!
for sure! no worries. I’m actually going to pick some people’s brains about getting it all on one line – that feels so much cleaner. thanks so much for the question, bex!
and the clip you shared is lovely as well 
