In this, the final episode of our guitar processing extravaganza, we are going to step away from making effects and focus on performance support. For a system as complicated as this, performance support means two things: patch storage and realtime control. Thus, we will learn to create a preset system and manipulate the various on-screen controls with an inexpensive MIDI footpedal system.
At this point, we have a pretty useful guitar processing “rack”, but it could use a little spice. This spice will come from two additional processors: a looping delay unit, and a basic reverb system. Also, to help keep the output useful, we will drop a limiter on the back end of the entire rig.
I recently attended Winter NAMM 2009 in Anaheim,CA, where Cycling ’74 was sharing booth space with our friends at Ableton. I arrived on Friday afternoon, well after we had released our product announcement for Max for Live, and was impressed by the volume of booth traffic we were getting. Ableton had, of course, also announced their new Akai controller and Live 8 in addition to Max for Live, so there was a great deal of buzz surrounding our area of the show.
This article provides a brief tour of the features we’ve added to Max for creating Live devices. If you’re familiar with our old plug-in development objects, we hope you’ll notice the major improvements we’ve made. If you’re new to creating Max content for audio and MIDI processing, we hope this tour will give you a flavor of the tools that will be at your disposal when Max for Live is released later this year.
Please note, the information presented here is preliminary and subject to change.
Nine years ago, Robert Henke told me about the edit button.
Robert was in Anaheim, giving amazing Live 1.0 demos non-stop at Ableton’s first NAMM booth, and before the last day of the show, we were chatting in the topiary-enhanced parking lot of Stovall’s Inn. Having used Max to prototype some of the first effects included with Live, Robert told me he wanted to be able to reprogram his effects on the fly, without stopping the music, just the way everything else worked in Live. At that time, the reality for Robert would have involved translating his revised patch into a C program and rebuilding a new version of Live. This was not exactly the real-time development cycle he was used to as a Max user.
Max Integration into Ableton Live
NAMM • Anaheim, CA • January 15, 2009–Cycling ’74 and Ableton today announced Max for Live, the integration of Cycling ’74′s Max/MSP environment into Ableton Live. Available as an add-on product to Ableton’s newly announced Live 8, Max for Live permits users to create devices that extend and customize Live by creating instruments, controllers, audio effects, and MIDI processors.
