Whether you’re working on generative pieces for one-off, never-to-be-repeated performances, or seeking chaotic inspiration from the aether for your studio productions, the plentiful randomisation options found within your DAW and its attendant plugins give you endless scope for randomising existing track elements and conjuring up entirely new ones, in real time or ‘offline’. Here, we’ve got five suggestions to get you thinking about them.

Bear in mind that you don’t have to commit to the first sound you hear upon clicking that ‘Randomise’ button – part of the joy of randomisation lies in doing it over and over again, as many times as it takes to get something you like. Oh, and when your randomness is happening in real-time but ultimately intended to end up as a finalised track element, don’t forget to record everything so as to not miss that perfect moment.

1. Get some chance-based plugins

The easiest and most obvious way to work a bit of random into your tracks is to avail yourself of plugins in that incorporate or are even built entirely around the notion, and there are copious excellent options to check out, both instruments and effects. Sonic Charge’s Synplant, for example, centres on the idea of generating patches from ‘seeds’, and makes heavy use of randomisation as part of the process; and there are plenty more synths and drum machines out there with random preset (for unique sounds) and sequencing (for unique patterns) generation functions baked in, too, including models by Krotos, Rob Papen, Sugar Bytes, Tone2, XLN Audio, D16, Audio Damage and Plogue.

On the effects front, Sugar Bytes Effectrix never fails to delight with its loony random effects sequencing; AudioThing’s various plugins all enable their parameters to thrown up in the air at the click of a button; and all MeldaProduction effects feature randomisers among their modulation sources. And we’re only really scratching the surface – randomness is ubiquitous in the plugin sphere.

2. Randomise your MIDI

Most DAWs incorporate at least crude randomisation of MIDI notes in the form of humanising algorithms that randomly shift timing and velocity to make programmed parts sound more ‘live’, but many of them let you go considerably further with your randomisation. Integrated tools such as Logic’s Randomize MIDI plug-in, Cubase’s Random MIDI Modifier, Live’s Random MIDI FX plugin and Studio One’s Random Notes function let you set boundaries and likelihoods within which pitch, velocity and note length changes will (or won’t) be applied to your sequences. And when you’re looking to randomise the playback of complete MIDI and audio parts within a project, the Follow Actions system in Live’s Session View includes an ‘Any’ Action that can be used to jump around randomly between clips on a track.

There are a few notable third-party plugins to consider here, too. AudioModern’s super slick Chordjam, Riffer and PlayBeat, for example, serve up random chords, sequences and drum patterns respectively, while AudioCipher converts words – yes, words – into MIDI sequences to great effect. All of them support drag-and-drop MIDI export, so you can refine the results in the piano roll (or randomise them further using the in-DAW options described above).

3. Loop rearrangement

Loop slicing and buffering plugins are awesome for tweaking and transforming beats, basslines, riffs and anything else you care to fling at them, and some of them include the means to have slices of whatever length you choose (16th-notes, eighth-notes, etc) randomly rearranged and/or repeated on the fly. Three of the best are Audio Damage’s Replicant 2, Sugar Bytes’ Looperator and HY-Plugins’ HY-Slicer, each of which approaches the randomised repeating, stuttering and effects processing of slices within a loop from its own direction.

For quick and dirty loop randomising without the need for a dedicated plugin, you can always rely on your DAW’s ‘slice to MIDI’ function, if it has one. This chops the loop in question up, loads each slice onto a single note in a multisample patch, and creates a MIDI clip that triggers them sequentially with the exact same timing as the original loop. Randomising playback of the slices, then, is as easy as moving notes around willy nilly, or bringing your MIDI randomiser of choice (see above) to bear.

4. Random modulation

Almost every synth and sampler – and a great many effects plugins – includes some form of random modulation source, whether it’s an old-school sample-and-hold module or an actual randomiser. These are ideal for imbuing patches with anything from subtle unpredictability (faux analogue fluctuations, cheeky pitchbends) to total chaos (sci-fi burblings, hyper-animated pads), and, depending on the plugin, will ideally be able to reach down beyond the usual filter cutoff and pitch parameters into effects controls, oscillator shapes, wavetable scanning and switching, sample selection, unison detune, sequencer controls, and the controls and even selection of other mod sources. Route them up, crank those mod depths and see what happens!

5. Manual randomisation

We touched on the DIY approach to randomisation in ‘Loop rearrangement’ above, with the movement of MIDI notes by hand to trigger loop slices, but there’s no area of production in which the same principle can’t be applied. Twirl the knobs on an effect with your eyes shut; select an effect with your eyes shut; hammer away at your MIDI keyboard or wildly click notes into the piano roll… with your eyes shut; plan the fretboard fingering of a chord sequence or riff, then execute it verbatim on a guitar that hasn’t been tuned for months; bung a load of blindly chosen samples into a drum sampler… you get the picture.

Not random enough for you? Want to neutralise all possibility of unconscious bias in your quest for serendipity and leave your composition/sound design/processing truly in the lap of the gods? Assign parameter settings, note numbers, velocity levels or anything else to a range of values, then roll a dice with the same number of faces (100 should be enough for just about any purpose), or fire up a random number generator, and do as the fates command.

On a more ‘macro’ level, no feature on randomisation in music would be complete without a mention of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. This is a deck of cards (available in hardware and software form), each of which contains an artistically inspiring suggestion: “Riff”, “Discard an axiom”, “Mechanicalise something idiosyncratic”, “Shut the door and listen from the outside”, etc. Draw one at random whenever you need a creative boost.

Do you have your own tried and tested methods of introducing chance to the production process? Share them in the comments.