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:

We already knew that one Next Big Thing for the Lemur – the specialized multimedia multi-touch controller – would be Ableton Live integration. Having teased that coming functionality, JazzMutant has now revealed the name (“Mu”), as well as a video showing what the features look like. What’s funny to me is that the result is a bit like what I’d imagine Live itself might look like if it were designed for multi-touch screens. That’s a real consideration for all music software UIs, given the direction of computer hardware. But in the meantime, with choices in multi-touch laptops scarce (makers like HP and Lenovo make a handful of models) and quality scarce, the Lemur hangs onto its niche. It comes with a solid set of tools for users to make their own layouts, it has the reliability of wires (which the iPad will lack, since it has no Ethernet port), and dedicated OSC functionality. While it may come to a surprise to those eagerly anticipated the iPad’s arrival next month, the Lemur’s fans are largely unswayed.

One reason is that, cool as Mu is, it isn’t alone. Musicians keep making fascinating control layouts for the Lemur, ones worth noting even if you don’t plan to buy a Lemur for yourself. For instance, Mat of music-interface.com sends along tips from his own work and beyond.

Rick Hawkins goes a different direction entirely from Mu, with a sequencer that’s esoteric enough to have “esoteric” in its name:

The EsoWave sequencer is a project for the Jazzmutant Lemur. It is a esoteric/generative midi sequencer that sends midi notes according to the positions of 32 nodes in a 2D plane. The nodes are connected along an elastic string and can be additionally controlled by two waveforms that drive the X and Y coordinates.

More info on the blog: ILL GOTTEN GAINS: The EsoWave Sequencer

Esoteric Sequencer Prototype – Ambient Session from Rick Hawkins on Vimeo.

Being a digital musician requires a new set of skills, a precise tack between the forces of engineering and creativity. Robert Henke aka Monolake is always someone I find thought-provoking, not only because he’s so open and articulate, but because he seems uniquely focused on balancing those two sides of his personality. As a media artist and producer, his work relies heavily on his own technological invention, but he is also able to keep true to his own aesthetic compass.

For acoustic evidence of where Robert’s mind is exploring, his full-length album Silence, released last month on his own Imbalance label, reverberates with clarity. To my own ears, its crystalline rhythms and finely-honed, always-foreground timbres and textures recall all the best of Monolake through the years, back to the early, pre-Ableton collaboration between Robert and (now Ableton CEO) Gerhard Behles. (For an eloquent review, see Fact Magazine’s take.)

As far as engineering in the sense of recording and production, Robert did a terrific interview with engineer/musician Caro Snatch for her blog; she gets some fascinating answers out of him and they even talk about his technique of avoiding compression on electronic sources. But I was interested in how engineering can work in the compositional sense: with open-ended tools like Ableton Live and Max/MSP, how do you create compositional systems? How do you wrestle with the potential of Max inside Live? Where do you draw limits?

As always, Robert has some sharp ideas – whether fodder for inspiration or disagreement, I think you’ll find things worth talking about. And indeed, while technology figures prominently, I think you’ll find some ideas that are really fundamentally about music, about compositional intent, thinking about sound, and thinking about rhythm.

A frequently asked question around these parts is, what’s next for JazzMutant’s Lemur? The dedicated multi-touch hardware showed that touch could be a powerful means of interacting with music and visuals, years before “iPhone” and “iPad” became household words. But now, make no mistake about it, new, cheap hardware is moving in on the Lemur’s turf.

I’m in regular touch with JazzMutant, so I can assure you, when they’re ready to talk, we’ll have some information. Right now, they aren’t sharing anything publicly. But I can tell you they’re in active development mode, and that many artists continue to use the devices in performance. One advantage of this being standalone hardware is that it does promise a certain amount of longevity. Glitch Mob have worked out an amazing performance with a set of Lemurs, all plugged into one machine running Ableton Live – hope to talk to them about that, so let us know if you have questions.

What I can share is this video by Dusty Kid, which shows tighter integration and clip launching capabilities with Ableton Live. Our friend Michael Chenetz of the awesome max4live.info is all over this one. Clip launching on Live isn’t new, but the integration here is more seamless and usable than what we’ve seen in the past. I’ll let you Live gurus analyze this video to work out what’s going on, as that’s the extent of what I can say.

It’s an unofficial video, not one from JazzMutant, but it’s a decent teaser. For the record, on the Mutants’ own site, they describe “the secret project Jazzmutant have been working on… the next level of integration with Ableton Live.”

I know many readers here now have their eyes on the iPad, because it’s at a price more people can easily afford. But it’ll nonetheless be interesting to watch these different rivals. There’s no reason, for instance, a Lemur programmer can’t learn from what iPhone developers are doing, and visa versa. And I suspect the Lemur and iPad/iPhone alone won’t be the only candidates.

Eat your heart out, Ableton/Serato The Bridge.

Native Instruments’ Traktor runs four decks at once without breaking a sweat, and there are various ways of incorporating sampling, scratching, and vinyl in a live rig that are pretty easy to set up. But lately we’ve seen some unusual options to build more elaborate setups. Rane even offers a digital mixer with two USB ports so you can, among other things, get four decks in Serato by running two computers at once. (Hey, never knock the brute force method of solving a problem.) And The Bridge, introduced to great fanfare by Ableton and Serato, synchronizes the transport and basic set information between Live and Serato. That’s to say nothing of the solution of using Ms. Pinky inside Live.

But none of this compares to Ilan Kriger’s method of getting four “decks” out of Ableton Live. He simply runs four complete instances of Live — one copy of Live 5, one copy of Live 6, one copy of Live 7, and one copy of Live 8 — in order to spread them out like the four decks in Traktor. (I’m not even going to ask Ableton whether this violates your license. Maybe you could start selling Live six packs?)

He uses a Mac for the job, but a PC should work, too. (Actually, that’d be an interesting performance comparison; you’d need to make sure your ASIO drivers on PC allow multiple apps to access the same interface.)

Go ahead. Hit the comment button. Tell us that this is an insane, impractical solution to the problem. (Really? Wow, I … didn’t … expect you to react that way. I must have entirely missed that.)

And good work, Ilan. Now, Ableton engineering teams, see how important the work you do on each release is? You never know when someone will run all of the different iterations you’ve built over the past four years at one time. Got it?

I think we need to invent a new prize for Only Because It’s There ingenuity. Suggestions? What should the trophy look like?

Ilan’s setup, blogged and translated by Google from Portuguese into English
Original Português

It’s a “tutorial,” in case you want to replicate the results. (In which case, I’ll have what you’re having.)

I will say this: inter-application communication is important, even if this isn’t the most practical example.

Original video (Português):