Max to Create Big Displays 4 Essential Live/FX Parameters?
Hi:
Apologies up front if this is a stupid/obvious question; I have some experience with Live and mapping Live controls to control surfaces, but know next to nothing about Max (though I've now been wrestling with it for a couple of days).
I'm a guitar/piano-playing singer/songwriter trying to hack together a Live-based rig that allows me to loop guitar, vocals, and keys, as well as get crazy with dub-style FX on all 3 instruments, and I'm trying to use Max For Live to build a simple custom device that displays essential information, specifically:
- What the current state of a Looper device on track 1 is (recording, overdubbing, reversed, playing, stopped, cleared)
I've actually had some valuable help from S4racen over on the Ableton forum on this (thanks again!), and have put together a patch that seems like it might be 75% of the way there. However, I must be missing something, because it doesn't seem to actually do what I'm expecting it to do, or...anything, really. I initially inserted this as a device in Ableton on my Master track, where it seemed to have no effect. Then I added a Print object at the bottom to see whether I could see any output in the Max Window when I clicked the path message box at the top - nothing happened, though.
I thought I'd post here too because I can actually post the patch I'm working on, in case anyone's moved to check it out and comment on what incredibly obvious thing I'm missing :).
If anyone had the time to take a look at this and either quickly describe what I might be missing, or direct me towards some Max patches with functionality similar to what I'm trying to build, so that I can deconstruct them and maybe steal some components for my own patch, that would be ace!
Hopefully that makes sense. Any helpful advice would be incredibly welcome. Thanks!
Here's the patch:
Hi radionowhere.
Saw your post on Ableton forums and meant to reply there, but one thing and another . . . it slipped by me.
This device:
. . . might do what you want it to, or have code you can look at / appropriate for your use. I haven't gotten around to testing it myself, as I'm one of the many for whom Looper just doesn't function (phantom [cleared] loops reappearing), so beyond pointing you @ the thing I have no idea if it works, or is what you're looking for etc.
But there it is.
AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
This is almost perfect - thank you so much!
I thought I had searched maxforlive.com for "looper", but somehow I didn't turn this one up. As I said, it's_almost_perfect.
The only remaining capabilities I'd like this to have are:
- display other looper states (reverse, cleared)
- reads state of looper placed in return track (doesn't seem to do this right now)
I'm going to take a shot at adding these functions myself, but if there's anyone who reads this and says to themselves, "hmmm, that sounds mighty easy"...well, if you have any interest in a quick post letting me know how it's done, I'd be really appreciative; I took a quick look at the patch and realized that there's a bunch of stuff in there I haven't encountered/don't understand yet.
Anyway, thanks so much again for leading me to this!
P.S. I know what you mean about the buggy Looper. I've had some luck with a) mapping buttons on my controller to the small play/stop/overdub buttons, and leaving the big button alone, and b) using MIDI notes rather than CC messages to do it. I haven't really torture tested this setup yet, but you might give it a shot. Here's hoping they've fixed looper in Live 9.