Ableton co-founder and general visionary Robert Henke (also known as Monolake) gave a full-length workshop in New Zealand recently. If you’re up for 90 minutes of discussion of musical and sonic techniques in Live, plus a look at his unique Monodeck controller, the whole video is there. But that’s not the main reason the video is making its way around the Interwebs. It’s because there’s a bit of a bombshell right at the beginning of the footage:

He says, outright, you don’t need 64-bit sound to get “audio quality.” You don’t even need 16-bit all the time.

Okay, maybe that’s not such a radical thought in and of itself. Oh, yeah, except for one thing — the 64-bit summing engine he’s talking about happens to be the one in Ableton Live 7.

Video by Tom Cosm, via AudioLemon

Some people are already assuming this means Ableton has somehow betrayed them (well, in fairness, Robert does say the summing engine is just a marketing gimmick). And what about Cakewalk? Robert doesn’t mention them by name, but the only DAW that’s been trumpeting 64-bit mixing and signal processing is SONAR.

In fact, far from conflicting with Robert’s vision of sound, Ableton Live 7 really embodies it. And as for the Cakewalk thing — well, that’s complicated, because the term “64-bit” applies to a number of basically unrelated topics dealing with sound and computing. But none of that matters as much as one thing: if it sounds good, it is good.

The brains at Ableton have long had a fascination with tools like Max/MSP; Live architect Robert Henke (aka Monolake) regularly prototypes new software ideas in Max, and long before Live was released, was well known in the Max community as a patcher. One of the things I like best about Max is that it’s a great problem-solver. So it’s little surprise that Ableton is using Max as an aid in generating sounds and patches for the instruments in Live.

For the first time, you can download one of those tools and use it yourself, and you don’t even need a full copy of Max:

Ableton Meta-Sound Generator Software [Ableton Beta message thread]
Mams generator download [Monolake downloads page]

If you don’t own a copy of Max/MSP, you can download the Max runtime from Cycling ‘74 at the Max/MSP runtime page for Windows, Mac, or Mac Universal. The tool lets you generate complex waveforms using additive synthesis: specify the frequency bands you want, try out the sound, then save as a file you can bring into Simpler and Sampler. It’s a lot of fun, and if you’re allergic to presets and prefer to shape sounds your own way, you’ll definitely want a copy.

If you come up with some interesting presets, let us know. (AMS files seem to require Live 6, so you may have to wait until Live hits public beta; currently some of you may be on beta, but the testing circle is limited.) I’m using Live 6 on a daily basis, so you can expect more tips over the coming weeks.