Even before Max for Live was available, hackers had found a way of interacting with “secret” APIs inside Live for custom control, allowing them to customize Live’s behavior and make it work more seamlessly with hardware. That included providing something Ableton themselves had not: real, native control of Live via OSC, for more control than MIDI alone can provide. I was assured such hacks would continue to work, and sure enough, they have. Here’s how to get started.

You may wonder, of course, why even bother now that Max for Live is available? Max for Live is a powerful environment for creating instruments, effects, sequencers, and other devices within Ableton Live, and via its access to the Live API, it can even be a tool for customizing how Live works. But it adds an additional layer of abstraction, it is somewhat limited in how much it can manipulate interaction with hardware, and anyone wanting to use your creations will need to own Max for Live and not just Ableton Live. And not only that, but some people will simply prefer scripting in a language like Python to working with visual patching. (There’s still reason to consider M4L, too; see the full link to its “API” for Live, below. But we do have multiple options)

So, with that out of the way, here are the current solutions:

Make your own MIDI remote scripts.

Hanz Petrov has written an intensive introduction to creating your own MIDI remote scripts in Python, using the new Framework classes:

Introduction to the Framework Classes
http://remotescripts.blogspot.com/

Use OSC, via the Live OSC API Hack (or MIDI)

Ableton doesn’t have native support for OSC — unfortunate, given that’s now a feature of major visual applications (Resolume, VDMX, GrandVJ, Modul8, and others). But while we keep bugging Ableton for OSC to be on equal footing with MIDI, you can make use of a special Python hack that provides an OSC API to Live.

If the above scripting seems intimidating – and I can certainly see why it might be – the LiveOSC API is refreshingly simple. Because you can simply send OSC messages directly, controlling Live with tools like iPhone apps or Processing sketches or even hardware could become comparatively simple – and yes, simpler than working in Max for Live. If you only have MIDI, there’s even a MIDI API, too. Here’s where to start:

Complete documentation of the LiveAPI project [assembla]

http://monome.q3f.org/wiki/LiveOSC

Why it’s nice: you can send something as simple as /live/play/clip (track, clip) and trigger a clip. That’s even more direct than the usual MIDI interface.

Most importantly, this now works with Live 8.1. See the video below for an example of this in action:

mlrV4live tutorial (&casio madness) from StevieRaySean on Vimeo.

Check out his Arduinome build documentation, too. (Arduinome is an authorized clone of the monome using readily-available parts.)

The Max for Live way: Live Object Model

Complete LOM documentation at Cycling ‘74

And yes, it makes my head spin a little, too. (Or perhaps the word is “oscillate.”)

Max4Live.info (Michael Chenetz) has done a great job of making this a bit more manageable. In the video below, he explains how to use the interaction between Max for Live and Live; there’s also a tutorial on sending messages to a control surface like the Launchpad. But note that some of this can actually more complex, and more hardware-specific (APC/Launchpad-only) than the hacks above. It’s a case in which the hacked version actually works a little better than (cough) the official version.

Max For Live Paths, Objects, and Observers from Michael Chenetz on Vimeo.

My own challenge for myself: just make the Launchpad intelligently control device parameters, something it currently doesn’t do. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thoughts on the merits of these different approaches? Projects you’ve made using one or another? We’d love to see them.

Ableton Live-specific controllers just got another addition. You probably could have guessed this would come out, following the APC40 and Novation’s grid-only Launchpad last year, but the Akai APC20 is the new, smaller sibling to Akai’s APC40. The APC20 does basically everything the APC40 does on the latter’s left-hand side — it’s a grid of buttons, a set of mixers for your tracks, buttons for activating tracks (and solo/cue/record), and shortcuts for moving around and triggering the transport. Using the buttons, you can trigger clips or notes, with additional buttons for scenes and stopping clips around the outside of the 8×5 array.

The “Note Mode” is new, officially, but I believe hackers may have gotten the APC40 to do that. Hopefully it’ll be rolled out to the APC40 in an update.

What the APC20 doesn’t do is everything on the right-hand side of the APC40: you lose out on additional shortcuts, the crossfader, and most importantly, the controls for pan, sends, and Device Rack macros, though the controls seem to suggest you get some control back via control pages, as on Novation’s Launchpad. That makes the APC20 less appealing as a standalone to me. It gives you mixer faders missing from the Launchpad (which relies on buttons for the job), but it loses the ability to control devices and effects. And unlike the Launchpad, it seems the APC20 still requires external power rather than bus power.

Instead, it seems that Akai hopes you’ll buy the APC20 as a companion to your APC40, for, uh, 60 worth of APC. (I think we have a new unit of measure.) With what Akai calls “Combination mode,” you can add the 40 and 20 together for control of 80 buttons and 16 tracks. In Akai’s press release, it also seems that Akai thinks customers might add an APC20 to an existing rig with other gear — though that puts it in competition with the Novation Launchpad for the same job.

You can also buy six APC20s and use those together, and if you buy that many APCs, I recommend two things: one, seek professional help, and two, definitely send us photos.

This does still trigger the concerns I’ve been trying to raise since I reviewed the APC40 last year. Why should something as simple as chaining multiple devices together for control be a feature specific to a certain product? Haven’t we been chaining devices together as a standard feature all the way back to the invention of MIDI, now over a quarter century ago? (For the record, you can combine multiple control surfaces in Ableton Live. But the moment one set of controllers does that and another doesn’t, based on support in the software itself, that ceases to be a standard feature of Ableton.)

That said, for APC fans looking for some more control, the APC20 should appeal. But if I had to recommend a first APC, I’d still strongly recommend the APC40. Having a controller with built-in controls for everything Live does – clip triggers, mixing, cross-fading, effects, and device control, with all the shortcuts – really is a nice luxury.

http://www.akaipro.com/apc20

Pricing: Not yet announced Estimated US$199 street

Availability: Second quarter 2010

Now, it’ll be interesting to see if this is the last Ableton hardware controller news from this year’s NAMM or not; time will tell.

In the Pocket (Rhodes and Moog Light Paint) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

Fantastic, hip, soulful keys couple with brilliant stop-motion editing, as a Moog and Rhodes keyboard are splashed with light painting, in this new music video from Ethan Goldhammer. (See his blog for more.) It’s the perfect example of how a much-seen technique can retain its novelty when used creatively, especially as the sound itself seems to dance in light-up oscilloscope patterns.

Background:

Original music by Ethan Goldhammer and S. Burke.
Time Lapse footage shot in August 2008 on Block Island, RI.
Stop motion and light paint September 2008 in Cambridge, MA.

The lesson here: gear pr0n and special effects work perfectly when they visualize the way we feel about our musical objects and sounds.

Okay, so how did he do it? Ethan responds:

Ableton all the way. Recorded as loops with an [Akai] apc, then arranged later. The secret is also, making the animations, rendering them in [Final Cut Pro] but then WARPING them in ableton to the proper timing and bouncing them back to FCP.

Nicely done. Of course, this is why some audiovisualists have turned to Sony Vegas for Windows – formerly developed by Sonic Foundry, Vegas is actually half audio, half visual software. On the other hand, Live is a comfortable and flexible tool that does many things Vegas can’t.

Ethan also has a beautiful rendering of “Air on a G String,” the second cut from the legendary Switched on Bach. Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, please don’t stop Ethan; I’d love to see more collaboration instead.

Air on a G String (Oscilliscoped) from Ethan Goldhammer on Vimeo.

I really have no words for this one, other than there’s a hilarious APC40 meme happening on the Ableton forums. Is it love? Disdain? The APC as the new “All Your Base” for the Live warping set? Does it really matter?

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=116396

It’s good to know that, even as Ableton Live use has spread, us computer music folk are really not normal.

Via Tara Busch on Twitter of AnalogSuicide.

Warp: Engage

The new Warp Mode in Live may actually be friendlier to new users; it’s existing users, accustomed to the previous way of working, who seem thrown for a loop. (Erm… excuse the pun.) I’m at a bit of a disadvantage myself in that I tend not to do a lot of warping/remixing. But Medway Studios has a set of tutorials specifically geared for people wanting some tips on how to assimilate the new working method:

Part 2:

Our friend Dennis DeSantis of Ableton offers his own take in a video shot at NYC-based music tech learning center dubSpot. This is a pretty good conceptual overview of what the whole thing is about.

Basically, what I’m hearing is that people used to previous versions of Warp Markers, while they find it confusing at first, do like the new system once they understand how it works.

Controllerism

Mark Mosher has been doing fantastic tutorials on his site Modulate This. For one thing, he’s got tips for getting Wacom tablets to work in Live 8 and finally getting text entry support, which means Kore works properly in Live at long last (among others).

Best of all, he has a tutorial that demonstrates how he’s putting together all his controllers – the Notation ReMOTE SL with Automap and the Akai APC40 – and making them function more effectively using some subtle controller changes in Live 8.

What’s interesting to me is that this isn’t so much about unique, proprietary stuff added to the APC integration, but basic feature improvements in Live itself, which could help you be more effective with other controllers, as well. That’s the kind of functionality I like to see, because it helps everyone.

All of this is great, but we are getting a little heavy on the Ableton-only video tutorials. It’s time to pick up the screencasting tools and demonstrate other tools, too. I’ve got some time blocked out this summer for the task. Requests?

Not a whole lot to see in this very first video, but it does give you a feel for what the hardware itself is like.  Update: AKAI requested that the first video in this story be removed by its author on Vimeo, so we no longer have a video to embed.

The integration between software and hardware we should see revealed more over the coming weeks. I’m hoping to get my hands on one myself in the near future; I haven’t yet.

Of course, the APC isn’t alone. I’m still eagerly awaiting the Ohm64 from Livid, a beautiful controller with a wooden body, made with care in the US. Unlike the APC, the Ohm has a customizable MIDI response — the way the hardware itself responds is programmable. And, of course, there’s still the classic monome (site | cdm tag), open source hardware with an elegant minimalist design. Custom Max control patches have made the monome a favorite, especially for those with the chops to not only use the community-made patches, but build their own – by coincidence, the monome folks just posted a link to a library of Max monome objects. For both the Ohm and monome, it’ll be easier and more powerful to integrate Max objects with Live when Max for Live ships later this year. Even the APC will get its own custom patches. And, as Hédi points out, there’s also the elegant, compact, solidly-built Faderfox, which could also get a new lease on life with Max patching.

The upshot of all of this: even if people are using the same controller, they won’t necessarily use it the same way, which is how it should be. Stay tuned.

Update: this just in – a second video of the APC, this one sent to us by our friend Stephan Vankov (tetmusic.com). We’ve seen Stephan before, tearing up a wild audiovisual remix of The Karate Kid with the crew at the CDM NAMM party last year. It’s nice to see the APC out of the trade show floors, naturally.

dubSpot, the West Coast + East Coast music technology training center is doing an eight-city tour of the US to talk about Ableton Live 8 and the Akai APC40 controller. They’re enlisting some of my favorite people to do the workshops. I like the curriculum: it’s not just “here’s how to use Live,” but a real focus on music production, finishing actual music, and pushing the envelope with live visuals, onstage performance and controllers. We also have a $25 discount exclusively for CDM readers if you want to attend.

I want to thank dubSpot for helping sponsor CDM this month – their support makes possible our own free tutorial content and artist coverage slated for later in May.

The tour kicks off this week in San Francisco, but will travel to other US cities soon (dates to be announced; stay tuned).

The artists doing the instruction are some folks whose work I particularly enjoy:

• Jon Margulies, author of Ableton Live 7 Power among other things, and the person doing the Live 8 curriculum here in NY. And like me, Jon is a secret Medievalist (he’s played early music at Spoleto).
• Moldover, “Moldy” to his friends, co-founded the Warper series in NYC and the new LoveTech party in SF, and has become notorious for hacking Novation keyboards and espousing controllerism.
• Christopher Willits is an utterly brilliant guitarist capable of morphing the instrument into all kinds of sounds, for those of you who don’t know his work. And he’s been doing a lovely series of tutorials for our friends at XLR8R TV.

… plus a powerful roster of artists: Funkaid for Africa, Dub Mission, Jason Short, Dub Gabriel, and Barry Cole.

The workshop is $125 for one day or $225 for both. If you are lucky enough to hail from sunny San Francisco, dubSpot is also offering a $25 CDM discount if you head to their site via this link:

http://www.dubspot.com/pages/abletontour.jsp?aff_ref=CDM

But we’ll have more for the rest of the world, too – I’m playing with the Warper crew on the sidewalk in front of dubSpot NY in June, and we’re working on a way of doing a live stream to the CDM planet from there. Stay tuned.

Price: US$499 / EUR499 / street US$399
Availability: April/May (also about the same time you’ll see Live 8 – Max for Live coming later this year)

APC 40 FAQs, features and questions [Ableton Forum]

Since they were frequently asked around these parts, I want to single out these answers:

In one of the NAMM videos, somebody at AKAI proudly mentions a secret handshake between Live and the APC. But other reports seem to indicate that this unit just sends out MIDI. Does the device or Live send anything other than MIDI signals?

The APC Sends simple midi messages, and most of the banking and Session View control is handled internally in Live. Connecting another controller and selecting the APC40 preset will not work, even if that controller sends the same MIDI messages.

Will this secret handshake prevent us from turning a Monome + BCR into an APC?

Yes.

Will it be possible to use the APC with Live 7 out of the box with default mapping intact, or will I have to purchase live 8 to use the APC.

We’ll have a point release update for Live 7 with support for the APC40 in Live’s preferences, Live 8 will work with the APC40 when it is released.

So, you won’t be able to turn a monome into an APC – well, unless someone figures out a way to emulate the secret handshake. I’m guessing you curl your pinkies, then do a fist bump …

Of course, there are plenty of other interesting ways of integrating a monome with Live, some of which aren’t possible out of the box with the APC, and more should be possible with Max for Live (and other tools).

Akai was one of the music manufacturers that stole the show at this year’s NAMM trade conference. The simple reason: the APC is a rare combination of a whole mess of colored buttons with a whole bunch of faders and knobs. Now, the APC’s big selling point is its out-of-box experience with Ableton Live. Contrary to what you may have heard, there are people who don’t exclusively use Ableton Live – including some Live users who use other software (drum machines, VJ apps) on the side. Looking at the APC’s layout, you see a combination of stuff that would work for lots of other tools.

The only question: would the APC actually work with other software, or would it be hard-wired only to work with Live? Aaron Liven writes with evidence from Akai technical support that suggests you can use any app you want:

The APC40 is designed to be a dedicated controller for Ableton with specific midi cc’s that are hardwired for Ableton. There would not be a way to remap this on the ACP40. However if you can manually map your sequencing software or plugin to other midi cc values, then you can match this up to what the APC40 is set to in order to have control.

The one catch is that, as this email notes, it doesn’t sound as though you’ll get a template mapping app to choose other templates for other apps. That’s too bad: the Novation ReMOTE line, for instance, also works out-of-the-box with Ableton Live, but if you decide you want to reconfigure it for something like, say, a Native Instruments B4 organ emulation, you can. (In the case of the B4, a template is included, or you can use the powerful Novation template editor.)

On the other hand, very often people do their mapping in software anyway – particularly with VJ apps – so this will mostly be fine. And if the APC does become popular as a music controller, you can count on some template maps elsewhere, too.

The more significant catch is that the APC has only a USB jack — no physical MIDI jacks for controlling outboard gear. And I suspect that some of the features of the APC work via System Exclusive messages, meaning it’ll be substantially less cool when away from Live. (You may have to hack a way of getting those lights to light up the way you want, for instance – though that may not stop anyone.)

CDM has a pre-release date with the APC, so stay tuned. And there are other button- and pad-strewn goodies to look forward to this year, as well (NI Maschine, monome, and new DIY projects we haven’t even heard of yet).

Jay Smith of Livid Instruments may be in the business of making controller hardware himself, but that doesn’t stop him from appreciate the knob-laden goodness of the NAMM show floor. Jay’s own gear reveals a not-so-secret love of knobs and buttons and faders, and if you’re into that sort of thing, this year’s NAMM music trade show had plenty to love – Akai’s APC40 controller for Live, Akai’s MPK keyboard, the Alesis MasterControl, Arturia’s Factory Experience controller for their soft synth emulations, and even another brutish-looking computer-in-a-keyboard, now with pads, from Open Labs.

The shots give you a particularly good feel for what the Akai APC40 is like up close and personal. It’s no accident that Jay himself is a VJ. I really imagine that a number of these devices might be brilliant for running live visuals, though we still have yet to find out exactly how the APC works. I assume it’ll run as a standard MIDI controller outside Live, but I’m unclear on the specifics of what that will mean.

Thanks to Jay for sharing these photos with CDM.

Now I can’t wait to get another look at Livid’s own controller line and what may be next for it; see its wooden crossfader below. Previously:

Hands-On: Livid’s New Ohm Controller, Custom Control Geared for Visualists