MaxForLive: Creating Your Own Audio Tools in Max For Live

Welcome to the world of MaxForLive. Say goodbye to your friends, your spouse, and your social life (but surprisingly not your money). This is addictive stuff.

Our first download: This is the patch I showed in the previous video.

The name of this thing can be a little confusing. I’ll address that here just to get us all on the same page.

Max has actually been around for a few decades – while MaxForLive is fairly new. It has a long and strange history – worth knowing about (and fun to talk about!)

The MaxForLive Devices are our basic building block – sort of our canvas for creating devices.

The MaxForLive community is large and growing every day. There are a number of great resources for find and sharing patches.

Finally – I want to talk about some workflow tricks for starting from scratch (which we will be doing for the rest of this class)

MaxForLive (like Ableton) has a built-in Help section that can guide you to answers quickly.

Max has 2 different “modes” and both of them have 2 “views”.

“Patching” is what we call connecting things to build more complex things. In this video I’ll walk you through how to patch things and start building.

“Messages” are another kind of building block in Max, important to understand how to use.

The mighty “bang” message is something completely unique to Max, and a little tricky to wrap your head around at first.

One more note about my approach to teaching Max, and how you can best take advantage of this class.

This is how I approach programming a new MaxForLive patch – this is a trick that helps us to outline what we are going to build before we start.

Pipe – this is an object that will delay numbers, lists, and messages. Perfect for a MIDI delay.

Next we need a way to add back in our not-delayed signal. While we are at it, lets learn how to put a switch on this so we can turn it on and off.

We made this using the default [Midiin] object. But we could have used something called [Notein]. Whats the difference?

Here is the patch I just made for you to download, play with, edit, remake, build on, and have fun with.

First I’m going to walk through the different things we are going to need in order to put this project together.

Step 1: Delay some notes!

Step 2: Transposing notes!

Once we do something once, we can deploy it to do it a bunch of times.

Here is the patch I showed in the previous video. Download it, use it, dissect it, and play with it!

Objects with a Tilde (~) can have an audio signal in them – they mostly work the same, with a few oddities.

When we work with audio, we have a few extra UI objects for showing and interacting with our signal.

You will soon get used to these! I do them all the time.

Our main object for delaying an audio signal is Tapin~ and Tapout~. These work a little different than other objects we’ve seen so far.

We might as well slap an audio fader (and level meter) on this while we are here!

We should probably have a way to turn our dry signal on and off – so lets build that in.

Now that we have one delay, we can deploy it out and make many delays!

Lets go one extra step and make this one look nice by visiting Presentation view.

Here is the file (the “patch”) I showed in the previous video. Download it, use it, dissect it, and play with it!

We’ve seen Abstractions before, but for the next part, we will really want to look at them a bit deeper.

This is a list of a bunch of Abstractions that comes with your installation of MaxForLive. You already have these!

In this video I’ll walk you through the basic language of how we talk to Live, and show you a few patches I’ve made to outline the syntax.

Here is the file (the “patch”) I showed in the previous video. Download it, use it, dissect it, and play with it!

More detail on how we can ask for different devices and different parameters in Live.

Here is the file (the “patch”) I showed in the previous video. Download it, use it, dissect it, and play with it!

The Filtergraph~ object is what we use to control a filter. But it isn’t actually a filter itself. For that we need [biquad~].

We can get the tempo from Live easy enough, but what if we want a steady beat? It can be a little tricky.

Now that we have a beat, and a filter, lets connect them and see what happens!

Here is the file (the “patch”) I showed in the previous video. Download it, use it, dissect it, and play with it!

Thanks for Watching! A few thoughts on some more things you can do to keep learning!

Here is the file (the “patch”) I showed in the previous video. Download it, use it, dissect it, and play with it!

Update! Ableton has just released this awesome set of MaxforLive externals. Here is the link and what they are.