The Acolyte [VST/AU] Random MIDI Sequencer
The Acolyte is the little brother of The GridFather, more precisely it's the almost exact VST/AU version of my AutoPlay device, with all the bells and whistles !
The Acolyte is a AU/VST/VST3 plugin for Windows and macOS, that processes incoming input, and automatically plays random sequences based on it.
I's a huge timesaver for building interesting patterns, or sequencing arpeggios or basslines. The resulting MIDI can be recorded onto the DAW and further tweaked afterwards to fit best to the track, The Acolyte is not intended to creat full tracks, though it can be used for live performance to generate evolving patterns without needind too much work on stage.
The Acolyte offers the following parameters:
· Time allocation control between four different time divisions from 1/32 to 1/2, including dotted notes
· Ability to slow down the whole device up to 64 times using the "multi" parameter (providing up to 32 bars long notes to trigger arpeggios or full patterns on the target tracks for example)
· Minimum and Maximum length per note (as a percentage of each time division)
· Minimum and Maximum velocity per note
· Note probability (to insert some random silences and thus play with density)
· Multiple input notes handling (and choosing randomly between them at each step)
· Configurable sidechain feature to prevent notes from playing downbeat
· Hold feature to have the plugin keep going until transport is stopped or another key/chord is pressed
· Ability to transpose every note from the root incoming note, up to 2 octaves above root note, and down to 2 octaves below, with per note degree proba (from 1st to 12th note), and per octave probability
· Ability to directly load a given scale to instantly map the note degrees probability (60+ scales provided in a dropdown menu for example to directly select a major scale, or an 7th arpeggio, ...)
· Fully automatable parameters
Set-up and choice of plugin (AU/VST/VST3 and SYNTH/MFX) strongly depends on the DAW and OS, as it is necessary to create a MIDI listening track (direclty on many DAWs, or using IAC bus under OSX, and loopMidi for example under Windows).
The plugin has been tested inside:
· Apple Logic Pro 10.5 / 10.6 / 10.7 (MidiFX AU using IAC bus)
· Cubase Pro 11/12 (VST/VST3 both Windows and OSX, using IAC or loopMIDI, and Cubase Input Transformer capacity)
· Bitwig 4 (internal routing)
· Cakewalk (internal routing)
· Cockos Reaper (internal routing)
· Image Line FL Studio 21
· Presonus Studio One Professional V5 (may work in non Pro and probably in V4, not tested though)
· Tested under Pluginguru Unify (didn’t do the test myself so I cannot provide any help unfortunately)
Note that some hosts may only work on the VST2 version, the VST3 not being able to output anything. As well, depending on your host you will use the MFX (MIDI FX) or the SYNTH version of the plugin, all these are identical except for their packaging, and are provided to adapt to as many hosts as possible.
It should work with pretty much any DAW that can output MIDI data and filter incoming MIDI per channel.
User manual for set-up is provided of course with your purchase
and there is a full walkthrough of it on my Youtube channel there:
And the tutorial for V1.7, including a full set-up for several different DAWs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXDmLyvgt0
V1.7
· added multiple notes input
· added hold
· added sidechain
· added per octave proba and octave root lock
V1.4:
· added random engine freeze
· added dotted and triplets
· added 3x/6x/12x on slow down
· improves timing accuracy (down to a few samples)