Tom Cosm: Variations on a Theme

It’s a well-worn saying but still worth repeating; variety is the spice of life. As it applies to music, numerous studies have shown that what pleases the ear most is variety balanced with uniformity. In other words, as listeners we tend to gravitate towards music that offers up just enough surprises, but not too many, and within a familiar structure. 

One person who’s put a lot of thought into achieving this balance with electronic music-making tools is Tom Cosm. Beyond being an Ableton Certified Trainer, Cosm is the maker of numerous devices and techniques for injecting variety, variations, and surprises into the composition process. And now, in Tom’s episode of our One Thing video series, he demonstrates a simple and very effective method for combining variations of a loop (in this case, a bass line) into a new version that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

Another, more involved take on the same idea is his Leakage device. Taking full advantage of Wavetable’s tonal possibilities and Max for Live’s abilities as a controller, Leakage essentially gives you a completely different bassline sound for every note of your sequence. Of course pure randomized variety is not always desirable, and so Tom has built in a bunch of very useful control parameters to actually make Leakage musically useful.

Leakage is free / name your price and can be downloaded here.

Another notable collection of Cosm-made devices are the SUP’s (Slightly Useful Plug-ins), used by Laura Escudé to add elements of controlled randomness, as seen in her One Thing video:

Keep up with Tom Cosm on his YouTube channel

Listen to Tom’s track from his One Thing video on SoundCloud