Offering a free upgrade for current owners of Rando, MonkeyC have elaborated on their helpful sample selection and player plugin, with version 2.0 giving us even more power of total access to our samples, more or less randomly. And it’s hugely entertaining to (re)discover your sounds in this setting, especially with an extensive sample catalog at hand. Happy accidents incoming!
Roll the dice
Randomisation can be a really powerful creative tool. When I make music I don’t always come looking for anything in particular. Rather I’d like to make discoveries in sound and work from there, like crate digging my own folders and instrument patches, setting a few simple criteria to get started. I guess it’s more fun to me, my stuff also gets better when I had fun discovering, I think. And for this to happen, any help I can get starting a track is very welcome. For years I’ve had a ping pong agreement with my best music mate, each of us always ready to send a few random track starting samples via Discord to get things going or spice things up.
And with the recent addition of randomisation features at the DAW level in Ableton, which is what I use, as well as randomisation features in patch selection and tweakage in a growing number of third party plugins, there’s a lot of fun and exploration to be had for people like me that don’t really plan ahead with their music. For me, by now, being able to randomise at some level, is something I would expect from any new synth or multi effect hitting the market, for instance. Look at Playbox, Rift, Lion etc. It’s really a valid selling point to me.
So coming from this angle, I was of course very interested in taking a look at a dedicated plugin built for randomised sound selection from my sample folders. I have jumped head first into Rando 2, which is released as a free upgrade from v1 or for regular first time purchase by MonkeyC this week. And even if I can’t compare to the first iteration of the plugin, since I haven’t tried it, the Rando 2 beta used for writing this review has been a ton of fun, and finally gives a sense of purpose for my ever growing library of samples.
One for all, all at once
I don’t have a subscription to a sample service or any music service (except Spotify family plan because kids). I like to transact once, and own it forever, which is why I also buy from musicians I really want to support at Bandcamp.com. But with that old attitude comes the downfall of hauling all my samples around on a hard drive, trying to remember a fraction of what I even have. So what happens a lot of times is, I end up using samples from the same subfolders or something sent to me on the mentioned ping pong Discord order. There’s no way my brain can memorize the structure of 360.000+ samples. Ever. With Rando 2, all my samples become instantly accessible, even with a degree of control, since you can randomize all or select from within sounds like only one shots, loops, drums, pads and so forth. This is the kind of AI I welcome in music production. Human control over AI powers to reach the goal of making my music – composed by me. Not AI making music for me.
First things first
The very first thing I did after loading up Rando 2 was hitting the animated center button with a huge chuckle at the very first selection presented to me. Great random selection! One more. Hah! I then immediately went into Settings and had it show my currently played sound file per midi key. It’s just something I’ve grown accustomed to working with Ableton’s drum kit. With that setting on, Rando 2 feels a bit like working directly in Ableton as I have it set up – to a degree anyway. Beneath each audiofile you get controls like loop, oneshot, set sample/loop start and end, ADSR-knobs, transpose, velocity and volume. What you’d expect – and per key – so that’s instant familiarity. And apart from being able to populate the entire 7+ octaves on the keyboard UI (it’s a lot!) with a single click, there are also a handful of built in effects available on a per note basis and global effects as well. You can also lock single sounds you want to keep and re-randomise the rest – or randomise that one note. It’s just such a game changer to click around with.
Happy accidents galore
My first session of playing around with Rando 2 was a blast. I found that running an arp and midi pitch thru Rando 2 was a gateway to new ways of discovering and using my samples. On one channel I ended up creating a hook using this setup, while I based a drum kit and pattern on a happy accident found while arps were hitting a second instance of Rando 2, this one set to only randomise a selection of drum samples. Without Rando 2, maybe I could have ended up making the same sounds and synergy, but not in one go, and the speed at which you can audition, alter and re-roll everything with this plugin is just amazing and keeps the creative flow at an optimal pace. And if you like a selection, save it as a patch in Rando 2 and keep randomising. So good. Also, whenever you load up an instance of Rando 2, it populates the keys with random samples from your specified source directories. It’s a bit like loading up a new session on the Ableton Move or the Note app. Patch naming is also automatic, but editable too.
How fast is file indexing?
I recently built a fully mobile setup consisting of a mid-end laptop pc i5 16MB RAM with an external Crucial X9 Pro 4TB SSD connected to USB-C. It’s really no powerhouse to speak of. But surprisingly Rando 2 indexed a 2 TB samples folder with hundreds of subfolders within 15 minutes while using the plugin at the same time. That’s a ton faster than Ableton index, to say the least. But really, the plugin index speed will be a reflection of your current hardware. Pay less, wait more and vice versa. And if you have samples on several drives, you can specify that in Settings as well. Worth mentioning here, while speaking hardware, I’m able to run at least 4-5 instances of Rando 2 in Ableton, with no worries. Its footprint in processing is very light.
The 3 play modes
Rando’s main strength is the ability to load up many random samples that can be played per key – this is called Normal mode. Then there’s Chromatic mode which disables sample per key, and plays the selected sample chromatically – and you can either set timestretch on or off, meaning very long bass notes and very short high end note lengths when off, and a pretty decent sounding time stretch when on. So you find something like a pad stroke sample, and can try it out to play a melodic part, maybe capture that audio to a new track, and return to auditioning samples per note again. The third play mode is sample slicing, and for me in Ableton that’s nothing new or very needed, but maybe it’s useful in your DAW of choice. Slicing has at least been requested by the vibrant community supporting MonkeyC’s breakthrough plugin. And worth applauding here, I think, is the built in access to both manual, feedback, support and tutorial videos, right from the interface. Big devs could learn a trick or two!
In Sequence
Rando 2 has a nice sequencer built in as well. You can set parameters like steps, division, swing, velocity and length, and it seems this was no feature added just out of curiosity. This sequencer is pretty powerful, seeing as you can save patterns by themselves, to load with patches of sample selections, which again multiplies how fast you can come up with new ideas. The rhythmic patterns can be randomly populated as well, but also painstakingly edited by hand – but just as it’s the case with sound selection, you are the one in charge of what sounds good and gets to stay and become part of something. In the short clip above you can see and hear one way of working with the sequencer to build a few new drum loop by resampling Rando onto an audio track and cropping the new beats for later use elsewhere.
Wishful thinking
If you want to take your samples out of Rando 2, it’s cool that it lets you export all files in any given randomised selection, but really all this does is add data to your collection of samples, and I’ve always had a struggle having enough empty space on any of my drives. Which is why, in a future update or version, I would probably wish for the ability to select some or even all and drag these multiple samples from Rando at once, onto an empty drum rack or directly into session view, just like any multiple selection from an external folder or the Ableton browser. If this were to be possible, Rando would fill the gap currently void of any meaningful way of selecting multiple random files from many folders to drag and drop directly to your daw with no middle data – I’ve tried a few file randomiser apps for pc and they were just bad. If we could have this, Rando 2 would be the plugin of the year in my mind. But kudos for being able to drag off the plugin, one at a time, in the first place. It’s a step along the way for people wanting to select using Rando, but play using other tools like Ableton’s Drum Rack or similar.
Final thoughts
Rando 2 is a sleek looking, lightweight and multifunctional plugin with no real and direct competition, except for the first version and the one disguised as LANDR’s own plugin (MonkeyC developed it!). Rando even seems quite overlooked in the audio community at the time of writing and really deserves more praise, since it just works and is also pretty fast at the selection process. It’s such a fun tool that the fact that it’s also a playable instrument is a bonus in itself, and not exclusively the other way around. The onboard effects are a very nice touch, and even if they may not cover all bases needed, they provide silky smoothness when automated, unlike some plugins that can’t handle gradual shifts. Plus they’re available per key across 7+ octaves… that’s nuts! And even though you cannot drag all files out of Rando 2 at once, the fact that you even can, really is what makes the plugin extra useful for many workflows. So if you have a ton of samples and need an alternative way to create something, this is the one.
Rando 2 is out now and is a free upgrade to current owners of Rando. You can also buy it first time for 99 USD.
Note: You need an iLok account to work with this plugin.
