April 1, 2025

SMFFTI is my own, very humble and idiosyncratic program for generating creative MIDI files that I can drop in to Ableton Live and play about with.

I've been developing this for a couple of years now. It's really just a hobby that combines my past career as a programmer (Windows, C++) with computer music production. I excel at neither, but I still like dabbling.

At the moment, it has a very simple interface - perhaps a bit too nerdy - but it can do quite a lot. I genuinely find it useful for creating chord progressions, rhythm/percussion patterns, melodies, etc. Not being a trained musician, I've just tried to develop a tool that would give me a start point for further customization in Ableton Live. It saves me time, inasmuch as I can avoid a lot of tedious editing in the Ableton Live piano roll, especially for things like offsetting note start/end points and velocity.

I don't have a successful career in music production (MP), but I've spent a few years doing it. And what I realise is that MP is only partly creativity. The rest is systematic and technical. A lot of repetitive tasks and housekeeping. Often, onerous and boring activity to get a track completed. SMFFTI has helped my workflow quite a bit, since it simplifies my approach to developing the structure of my tracks and its various sections.

I've got a video which describes some of its features here:

Unfortunately, this video doesn't explain everything, and it would require a considerable effort to make more videos to explain it all properly. I hope to expound a bit more on it, but I don't want to be diverted away from making music (also which I'm not doing enough of!)

I continue to develop SMFFTI and make it available for free usage on the downloads page. There is also a comprehensive user manual running to 70-odd pages. Please bear in mind it is a Windows-only program. Also be aware that, if you try to run it on your computer, Windows will, by default, assume it to be untrusted and warn you. You can confidently ignore these warnings, since my program is friendly, benign and does not connect to the Internet. It serves only to help nice people make music.

If you come across this and find yourself curious about using it, be my guest. I would love to hear from you. Email me at kz@kendallization.com