As Max for Live matures, Ableton is working to convince more people to try this open-ended tool – and creations built for it – as a way of extending the experience of using Live for performance and production.

For years, music software has focused on trying to do everything you need, to be a solution to problems you haven’t even considered yet. But recently, we’ve seen a move to software that considers customization and extension a core feature – not just the province of the hard-core hacker or DIYer, but something basic to the tool. FL Studio, Renoise, Reaper, Kontakt, and Ableton Live, to name a few, each incorporate tools that allow scripting, customization, and custom instruments, effects, sequencers, and other tools. (Each does it in very different ways, I might add.) In place of from-scratch construction, these tools build on the capabilities of the software in which they’re hosted.

And even if you don’t personally decide to take on scripting or patching, that means you can take advantage of unique contraptions made by other users. These creations aren’t just hacking for hacking’s sake: they meet specific musical needs, and make tools more practical and expressive. Like knowing the reeds on a wind instrument or tuning on a guitar, they’re part of how musicians are able to make their instrument their own.

Of course, unlike a new effect or workflow tweak, getting your users to embrace an open-ended tool takes time, and it may not be for everyone. We’ve been following recent efforts by Ableton to respond to feedback from their user community. While these fall short of the ability to distribute patches to all Ableton Live users – something I and others have advocated – they do make Max for Live more affordable and patches built for it more accessible.

CDM talked to Ableton’s Daniel Büttner in February about some of the changes on the developer side, both in terms of improvements to the tools and guidelines to make patches better:
Ableton Delivers Max for Live Improvements and Guidelines, Responds to Feedback; Full Details

In the last couple of weeks, Ableton has made offerings to the user side.

Max for Live Sale: First, right now you can get Max for Live for less. In the month of April, Max for Live is free with a purchase of Ableton Suite 8 or upgrades to Suite from the Lite and Intro versions. If you have Live 1-8 or Suite 7 and upgrade to 8, unfortunately, Max for Live isn’t free – but it is half off. I’d like to see more aggressive, permanent pricing from Ableton if they want widespread adoption of the tool – it seems to me that offering a “Suite” without this key component is complex for users to understand and makes budgeting for Live needlessly difficult. But that’s my prerogative as a critic and writer, just as it’s their prerogative to determine that what I’m saying doesn’t make sense for their business. In the meantime, I can certainly recommend the Suite purchase if you’re getting Live new or upgrading from an intro edition.

Updated: Current Suite owners qualify for a 30% coupon which they should have received via email, says David from Ableton via comments.

If you’re considering Max for Live but aren’t sure if it’s for you, there’s also a 30-day free trial – always a good bet.

Featuring Max for Live patches: More interesting than the pricing stuff is the fact that you can get some truly spectacular patches for Max for Live, and Ableton is doing more to highlight the work of some of the most talented, creative artists working with the tool.

As readers have repeatedly observed, maxforlive.com is a terrific resource for Max for Live lovers and those wanting fun patches to play with. It now includes a Featured Devices page curated by Ableton’s sound team, with some really great, free stuff.

Ableton has also added both new basic devices – including some oft-requested options, like an LFO – and featured artist creations, too.

Max for Live Highlights from Artists

Artist endorsements can be a mixed bag – they sometimes feel forced, an attempt to get some fame to rub off on a product. Not so here: as with, say, some of the recent gems on the Reaktor side from the likes of Tim Exile, the featured artists working with Max for Live really are pushing the technology and the medium.

Robert Henke, aside from being an Ableton co-founder and conceptually steering a lot of their direction, has one of the best recent Max for Live creations. Monolake helped establish the granular sound on the electronic palette in the 90s, so it’s little surprise that a Henke-designed granular device is a terrific instrument. See the video at top – it’s one of the best reasons yet to try Max for Live.

Kapture by Liine is an eminently-practical entry, sucking all of the parameters in a Live set into snapshots and allowing you to morph through them. I’ve been testing this paired with their iOS app on an iPad, and it’s terrific; I’ll finally talk about it once I’ve wrapped my head around some good examples.

And, I should say, it’s thoroughly enjoyable seeing Richie Hawtin back as Plastikman – the work he’s doing on the tour is exactly the sort of audiovisual electronic performance I hope we see more of from artists famous and unknown alike.

There’s also a House-style beat generator by Alexkid (video, above), and of course the obligatory APC step sequencer (though check out more step sequencers below).

This isn’t just about pure electronic dance music, though. Henrik Schwarz has a new edition of a device that fits notes to a musical scale, as relevant to jazz artists working with electronic instruments as electronica artists. Katsuhiro Chiba makes some classic retro-80s synths that could appeal to keyboardists in a wide variety of genres. I love seeing versions of the Yamaha TX81Z or simple, analog-style Sep2.

The most welcome offering, though, may be the addition of new LFOs, which allow synth-style modulation of any Live devices. Manuel Poletti has a powerful LFO collection with plenty of options for assigning modulation wherever you like. (See our previous, unintentionally-controversial, coverage of LFO modulation in Live, and more examples on the maxforlive.com site.)

Find the artist devices, descriptions, and downloads at the main Ableton Max for Live site:
http://www.ableton.com/maxforlive

New, Essential Devices

Max for Live itself has added 21 devices that give the tool a more complete set of basic building blocks for patchers. That’s good news, in that it means a lot less reinvention – and because the value of Max for Live itself goes way up.

New in the release this spring are LFOs, envelope followers (for using an audio signal to modulate parameters), randomizers, and multichannel routing devices.

Indeed, my only concern here is that many of us hoped to see some of these capabilities in “native” Ableton Live devices, rather than Max for Live patches. An LFO to many users is an essential built-in module that would benefit the software, as it has been in some rival tools, comparable to tools like chord and pitch manipulation for MIDI included in Live.

I don’t know that the LFO per se is necessarily fundamental to Live. But I do hope that Ableton continues to develop native devices for the Live environment. Max for Live could serve a useful purpose here – as a testing bed and prototyping tool, as it has been intended – and aid in determining which tools really do need to be included with Live itself.

More (updated info) on the included devices:
What Comes with Max for Live

And Don’t Forget…

Even with all these Ableton-provided goodies on their site, it’s worth visiting community sites like the unofficial maxforlive.com.

There are some gems at maxforlive.com, including the featured page:
http://maxforlive.com/featured/

– some of those, in turn, chosen by Ableton. Pictures of some of my favorites:

Let us know how you’re using Max for Live, if you find it fits into your workflow or if you focus on the core Ableton software instead. And certainly, if you’re a Max for Live patch developer or user and want to show off your favorites (including your own), we’d love to hear from you.

Touch performance control on devices like the iPhone and iPad has become increasingly popular, but the question remains: can developers push these interfaces further? Richie Hawtin has initiated a new touch control project and promises more “advanced” control of Ableton Live for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users.

Details remain murky – developers Liine say they’ll tease out features over the coming weeks. But the system, when fully revealed, will be modular, with a set of touch objects and gestures across a set of apps that provide touch control. The first application is Ableton Live-specific, and provides a new mechanism for controlling Live’s grid of clips. The developers say Griid makes it easier to find clips and see information about them, even when navigating large sets of clips. (You know who you are, those of you with enormous Live sets with a zillion colored clips.)

Different editions will scale to different screen sizes, with Griid Pro for iPad, and Griid for iPhone/iPod touch, plus a Lite version for free.

What all of this means or whether it lives up to these claims is, well, a complete unknown outside of the Plastikman stage. That is, unless you happen to be in Barcelona at SONAR this weekend. Tomorrow, Saturday, Richie will be demonstrating the app in person. Liine tells us:

“At the hands-on Richie will show how he uses the app in his Plastikman Live show. There will also be another laptop or two set up and hooked up with Griid so that they can give it a try themselves.”

If you can make it and want to report back to the rest of us, I’d love to hear it. And I expect to bring more info to CDM soon, if not. But it certainly works for Richie; check out the video below of him using the tool at Detroit’s Movement festival, for his new Plastikman Live show. (And yes, this is bringing back Plastikman and more of the live performance, rather than simply DJ, the side of Richie a lot of us love best.)

http://liine.net/griid/
http://liine.net/

If you’re at SONAR, check out http://ghost.m-nus.com/ (and if you’re not, that site has live streams and audio – warning, audio auto-plays!)

The video cuts fast, but in these still images, you can get a better view of the software and Richie’s setup, including the JazzMutant Lemur touch hardware and Behringer BCF-2000 motorized hardware faders alongside the iPad:

There’s the music player, the device in your home or your pocket on which you listen to the album. And there’s the concert experience, where you have a couple of longnecks and get sweaty and dance with your friends to live musicians.

But wait a minute – now the musicians are using computers and music players to perform. What if that music player became part of the interaction at a live gig?

Richie Hawtin is going live with a new show via his Plastikman persona – great news to those of us who love his original work. Part of the new tour is an experiment with an iPhone app called SYNK, developed under Richie’s watchful eye with Minus’ Bryan McDade and TouchOSC developer RJ Fischer (hexler.net). I tried to get more details on how the app will work, but apparently they’re trying to keep some of it under wraps until the first show in Mannheim this weekend. (If you are making the Mannheim show, I’d love to get your coverage – it looks like the East Coast of the US didn’t make the cut.)

We do know a little, though, and that already raises questions – and likely some skepticism, too, I imagine – about how mobile devices could be integrated with performance. There’s a very jumpy “teaser” video, below, too:

Watching closely, I see

• Numbers running behind the stage and on the iPhone, some pattern of rects on the iPhone
• Visualist collective Derivative’s modular, visual-making software TouchDesigner
• An Ableton Live set with an obscene number of effects (12!) sends, for reasons that are unclear to me
• A Max for Live patch that uses the Live API (and is sending OSC via IP address, presumably to interface with the iPhone)

The application itself includes modules that allow the audience to reorganize word samples (a bit like playing with magnetic poetry), a live video stream of the performance from the inside out, visuals that appear on your iPhone/iPod touch that are synchronized with the onstage LED wall and music, and real-time performance information (apparently synchronous with handheld software that’s used for the performance itself).

The most interesting part of all of this is that it’s location-based: it’s designed only to work when you’re live at the show. Between shows, however, there is a mode that includes a self-contained audiovisual experience.

While part of the appeal to me of live performance is getting away from all my own technology and listening, it is encouraging to see creative experimentation, and mobile software that’s about more than just the artists promoting themselves.

More on the modules (including some special information passed along to CDM from the Plastikman crew):

The official description:

LOGIKAL
Based upon earlier “Lodgikal Nonsense” and “Vokx” voice tracks, this state invites the audience to re-organize the word samples using a user interface of 20 touch buttons. In this state the centre of performance control is moved from the stage and into the audience.

KAMERA
This state is accessible throughout the show and gives users a live video stream of an internal perspective of the performance.

SYNKOTIK
This state explores the synkronicity of realtime-generated percussion patterns and their visual counterparts, integrating the stage LED wall and the built in displays on each SYNK activated iPhone/iPod Touch.

KONSOLE
This state is active during the entire show with realtime performance information. At specific moments an extended Konsole state becomes activated, allowing further insight into the realtime programming of the performance’s drum and percussive elements, while also providing visual feedback of musical and effect parameters. A simplified remote Konsole is available to all SYNK users worldwide and will be activated during all Plastikman Live performances.

Participants should connect to the Plastikman Wi-Fi network at each performance and will be notified of the activation of the different states by their iPhone/iPod Touch at specific moments during the show.

The SYNK experience will not be limited to viewers of the live show. In between the performances the SYNK application will be in sleeper mode and function as a Plastikman atmospheric location shifter. By using visualizations inspired by Derivative, combined with the iPhone’s built-in microphone and accelerometer, users are immersed in a Plastikman environment. For best results, please use headphones.

The “sleeper mode” confused a number of people, so I inquired further. Minus helped us out a bit.

Bryan McDade tells CDM:

“[Sleeper mode] is the visualization which takes place as the default interface into the app when there is not a functioning show. The app uses some visuals inspired by design from the people at Derivative and the microphone picks up audio and plays it back through the speaker while warping the audio with the use of the accelerometer. The audio function has been compared to RJDJ by others in the online community.”

Richie Hawtin adds:

The idea of the sleeper mode is to give users the feeling of bring immersed in their own personal Consumed type environment modulated by their movements and the ambient sounds around them.

Sounds great to me; I’d love to see apps beyond just RjDj that run with this idea. It’s such a great idea, in fact, that I wonder how performances could cater to multiple phone platforms, not just iPhone.

I’m excited to hear more about the tour and about the development of Synk, and I have to hope they add more dates or I find some way to cross paths. Stay tuned for more details.

The tour:

27.03. Time Warp – Mannheim, Germany
18.04. Coachella – Indio, USA
08.05. WeLoveArt – Paris, France
21.05. Dissonanze – Rome, Italy
29.05. Movement – Detroit, USA
18.06. Sonar – Barcelona, Spain
11.07. T in the Park – Balado, Scotland
06.08. Sonne, Mond & Sterne – Saalburg, Germany
07.08. AudioRiver – Plock, Poland
21.08. Lowlands – Biddinghuizen, Netherlands
10.09. Sunday Best presents Bestival – Isle of Wight, UK

SYNK @ iTunes

SYNK @ hexler

plastikman.com

Richie Hawtin has been the subject of adulation and sometimes seemingly-random scorn by readers of this site — blame the passions of the Internet. But amidst that noise has been a clear signal: bring back Plastikman.

Richie is a terrifically talented DJ, but for many of us it’s his work as a producer that we love. And for all m-nus has done over the years, the handful of work that comes from Richie’s Plastikman persona remains significant. He’s announced he’s bringing Plastikman back, and has a survey to match. Don’t worry – this isn’t something like “What’s your favorite bpm,” or “specify preferred filter cutoff frequencies.” It’s more along the lines of whether you’d see a show in Santiago or Perth. But there are indications of a new live show and re-releases. (I’m not clear whether the “new project” includes a new release, but I do hope so, and it does talk about “creative process.”)

When considering the various aspects of Richie Hawtin’s persona, it seems fans reserve a special place in their hearts for Plastikman. So it’s only right that as we prepare for a new Plastikman project next year, you should have some input and control over exactly what you see and hear.

http://www.plastikman.com/survey09/

Richie Hawtin and the also-excellent Ambivalent reflected on music making with technology at DubSpot here in New York over the summer. I think they had some really good things to say, even if your own music tends in other directions or genres, so now is the ideal time to share that. Both Richie and Kevin spoke about the need to incorporate physical gestures into digital music making, whether it was drawing on the performance (for Ambivalent) or locking oneself into the studio and getting physical with the gear (for Hawtin). That made something like Maschine important to Richie’s newer work, he said. DubSpot has video of this conversation (led by an audience Q&A of Ableton users), as well as a private conversation with Richie about his work.

Videos via the DubSpot blog.

Thoughts? Care to disagree, for that matter, with their take on performance and what matters? (I think there’s plenty to discuss here in an open conversation.)