Apple appears to have accidentally leaked an upcoming version of Logic Pro with the signature feature of Ableton Live – nonlinear pattern launching.

While spotted on Reddit, the source of this leak at the famously secretive company appears to be … Apple itself. As I write this, the screenshot is still live on a public education site:

https://www.apple.com/education/products/

If this is real – and not a mock-up that accidentally wound up on the page – it represents a landmark. That landmark might best be described as “what took you so long,” arguably, given that Apple Loops have been a feature of Logic Pro and GarageBand back to the reveal of GarageBand in January 2004. (Time flies!)

We can pretty easily analyze the screenshot. At the top, new icons appear to let you view a nonlinear Session View-style layout, the normal track arrangement, or both. (In this screen shot, the two are side-by-side.)

As with other copies of Live’s signature Session View, the horizontal and vertical axes are flipped. So whereas Live shows you tracks the way channel strips appear on a hardware mixer, vertically, Apple opt for a view more like a software DAW. Tracks are laid out horizontally, so that they match up with the arrangement.

Really, my issue with this is that you wind up with kind of a jumble of interface elements. That’s been the challenge in other DAWs trying to do the same. (An ill-fated effort in Cakewalk nee SONAR springs to mind; MOTU has tried the same in DP, but it’s a bit too soon to know yet how DP users are responding.)

Part of the appeal of Ableton Live is that the entire engine and software operation are structured around the idea, and the UI is clean and compact as a result. Here, part of the reason people may have responded that the image was fake was that it gives the user a lot to digest.

You’ll also see X/Y-pad effects at the bottom, including a filter and repeater – aping something that was in Ableton Live way back at the start.

I’m not sure how users will receive this. It could represent a blow to Ableton in the crucial education market, however, regardless – because it might allow education buyers to standardize on just Logic seats. But it represents a challenge independent software developers face, up against a company the size of Apple, when it comes to value.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t assume anything until there’s official word from Apple. Given this absolutely represents some kind of screw-up, it’s possible the screenshot itself is not representative of something Apple will actually ship.

And I wouldn’t worry too much about Ableton – the company has proven time and again that users are loyal to its workflow and simplicity, whatever the competition. Those of us sometimes swapping between Logic and Live might meanwhile just find this a welcome convenience. Time will tell.

Mainly I’m just sorry for whoever is working at home who may have, erm, just let this out.

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A surprising number of Ableton Live users haven’t discovered the power of Max for Live inside. Here’s how to get started – but, oh, you’ve seen it all before? Okay, smarty-pants, learn how to make your own devices, too.

Beginners and those needing some fresh ideas…

Anxious times can be a big barrier to inspiration. And that’s why this guide is useful now. Max for Live add-ons can be particularly useful not just for solving problems, but pushing you in a different direction or getting you back in a state of play. That’s been useful even for me – I was feeling stuck, and wound up finding some new tools that got me going again, just while writing this.

As long as you’ve got a copy of Ableton Live Suite, Max for Live is waiting for you. If not, it’s also a pretty major reason to upgrade.

I’m thrilled to again partner with Riemann Kollection to make a complete guide:

Max for Live: the techno producers’ guide

It starts at the beginning; no previous knowledge – what Max for Live is, how to use it, and how to get started with a lot of useful devices in a host of different categories.

Max for Live has an impassioned following, but I suspect a lot of users of Live are afraid to go there. Here’s the thing: you really don’t need to know how to use Max. The fact that Ableton baked in one the most mature and most powerful toolkits for making music production and live visual inventions means you can use the tools everybody else is making.

As it happens, ELPHNT also produced a two-part list of their favorite devices on maxforlive.com. I purposely ignored this list, and still imagined we would overlap. Speaking to the depth of the M4L world, not one device is on both lists. (I even plugged ELPHNT on my list, but it’s not in the Ableton.com story!) Read: [ Part 1 | Part 2 ]

… and those ready to make your own stuff

Okay, maybe you are curious to dig into Max and Max for Live and try customizing devices or creating your own from scratch? And, uh, maybe for some reason you find you have a bit of time on your hands? Well, you’re in luck.

Ableton has an official page with resources. Pay particular note to this line – “Access the Max for Live built-in lessons by clicking on the Help menu–>Help View.” That’s really where you most likely want to begin.

Max for Live tutorials and learning resources [Ableton]

Probably the best comprehensive resource is this Kadenze course from the imimitable expert Matt Wright; it’s a full course equivalent to serious college instruction, and it’s free:

Programming Max: Structuring Interactive Software for Digital Arts

But for a single video intro, try this:

or this –

or this –

More recently, Cycling ’74 also shared best practices in making devices, which would be useful if, uh, you want to share with others. (I mean, for yourself, be as horrible as you like!)

Multichannel audio is what is really useful in the most recent major upgrade:

Finally, because of the current crisis, you can shadow a college course in Max here. I once taught this course for CUNY. I would not be able to do it now – Max has changed radically since I did it, and I have forgotten a bunch – so I’ll be checking it out! There are some sharp tips in there. (and if you know Max a bit, crank up the speed and pretend you’re Data from Star Trek as you go rapid-fire through the parts you know.)

Overwhelmed?

Well, this is about play. So as I said, it’s totally valid to just grab a fun device or two and … try something.

So I still recommend my guide – as a break from dev work, or if you realize your brain is more tired than you thought and you got over-ambitious (never happens to me – I’m lying):

https://riemannkollektion.com/blogs/techno-producer-knowledge-hub/max-for-live-the-techno-producers-guide

See the complete Riemann techno producer knowledge hub for lots of advice.

Images courtesy Ableton.

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You’ve got tons of devices that let you tweak sounds of synths and effects with knobs. So why not warp time, too?

That’s the idea of FlexGroove, the latest add-on for Ableton Live and Max for Live. Just as you use envelopes and breakpoints to control volume or effects parameters elsewhere in Live, this tool lets you go in and speed up time, slow down time, and transform groove and meter just as easily.

Even as a big believer in words (words rock!), that is something that screams out for a demo. And once you hear this, you’ll get right away why you might want something that does this:

Speeding up (accelerando), slowing down (deccelerando), expressive give and take (rubato), and meter changes are essential building blocks of music in a wide variety of genres and cultures. So on some level, it’s weird that they tend to be hidden in machine music interfaces, in hardware and software – or at least relegated to working on just a master tempo track.

That said, putting them into a dedicated device like this means you can treat these elements in a focused, compositional mindset. And device creator Martin von Frantzius, a composer and musician himself teaching in Germany, has pulled out all the stops.

So you get six timing modes, each with its own presets:

• Free time (drawn in with breakpoints)
• Acceleration
• Deceleration
• Sine/half sine curves
• Ratio – (which lets you do metric modulations)
• Swing

And there’s a built-in pair of step sequencers, plus controls for humanization and velocity, plus probability.

Basically, you fire this up, then spit out clips. Some of the ideas here are really performative, so it’s a shame in a way that it doesn’t focus on playing these things like an instrument. On the other hand, I think for composers, someone adding excitement to a score bed, creating a dynamic break/drop in dance music, and otherwise spawning a ton of more interesting clips – it looks seriously addictive.

And it should also cure you of the dreary feeling of a bunch of on-the-grid monotonous and unmusical clips in your Session View. I just now got the NFR, but this looks worth 39EUR to me.

https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/flexgroove/

Got patches of your own, or favorites from maxforlive.com? Let us know! The more time-warping devices, the merrier, really!

And it’s great to see Ableton continue to use ableton.com as a kind of label for creative Max patchers.

Check out Martin’s page for tons of interesting teaching and engineering and violin and composition projects, like an online church-organ you can play, and — this, for more experimental time-bending with violin:

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The latest pattern tool for Ableton Live and Max for Live is a source of complex rhythms, new ideas, and performance tools. And it all started with a good read about a real drummer.

The overload of social media and news means we live in a great time to slow down and read a book. And so even with a load of Max for Live devices out there, our story begins with some in-depth reading by developer John Howes unplugging from the screens and having a proper read.

The late Jaki Liebezeit was the drummer from German experimental rock band Can. (See obits in The Guardian, Rolling Stone.) Lovers of his work successfully crowd-funded the exhaustive book “Jaki Liebezeit: Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer.” (Well, you inspired me to get this, too, John!)

Part of why I love software in music is that it can mirror compositional ideas, the practice of musicianship. So sure enough, while these Max for Live devices aren’t instant “Jacki in a Can” (uh, sorry) – that rock band did spark some investigations of rhythm and pattern in software. And now you can reap the benefits, and see where it takes you.

View this post on Instagram

I read the book about jaki leibezeit and then built this rhythm sequencer. It’s designed to keep rhythms flowing while you create new patterns and variations on the fly. Been making a lot of music with it over the Christmas period but keen to see how it fares in someone else’s hands. If you want to try it drop me a DM 🙂

A post shared by Cong Burn (@congburn) on Jan 2, 2020 at 2:24pm PST

Euclidean rhythms are nothing new – the basic idea is to spawn somewhat symmetrical patterns mathematically. It’s grown in popularity partly because these symmetries are commonly found in music as diverse as cumbia and Bulgarian folk music. Strokes builds on this idea by conceiving rhythm as a “flow controller” for rhythm – letting you “focus on the overall movement” of patterning in time. You get controls for length, “radius,” “strokes,” and “shift.”

It’s just a really elegant, visual interface for the technique. And by reducing everything to those four controls, there’s space to add channels – a full eight of them, so you can layer really complex polyrhythms.

There are loads of other features, too:

• On-the-fly controls, including variations and fills (so this is great for performance)
• Snapshots – store, recall, and crossfade between four, and then create 12 automatic variations
• Link for repetitive beats, unlink for polyrhythms
• Pattern automation and modulation, plus MIDI output (which you can then route straight into Ableton Live for later editing and arrangement)

You can also now add accents and swing, and create dotted and triplet rhythms with a custom clock rate selector.

And then there’s Stroke’s companion, Weights. The notion of weights is using the same technique for modulation – 4 buses you can route anywhere, complementing Strokes’ 8 channels of patterns.

Route to a Live parameter, or a VST plug-in – whatever. Inside Weights, you can also shape the modulation signal, modular synthesis fashion – using slew limiters and delays, for instance. And you can again work with snapshots and morphing and use automation and modulation with that.

In other words, these two tools let you turn Ableton Live into a semi-modular powerhouse for exploring polyrhythms, both in musical note/percussion patterns and modulation.

So, uh… whoa.

https://www.congburn.co.uk/strokes

Strokes is GBP 10 to download. Weights is a GBP 10 add-on; it requires Strokes, so think of it as an expansion pack.

Strokes is GBP 10 to download. Weights is a GBP 10 add-on; it requires Strokes, so think of it as an expansion pack.

If you just want a demo, though, you can grab the simple ‘alpha’ version and try that for free.

Really brilliant stuff – and John has a whole independent Bandcamp label to check out, too, while you’re at it. People making fascinating music and fascinating music tools – something about the times we live in.

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Accessibility in music can mean expanding expression beyond what is normally physically possible. For one artist, that means jacking a prosthesis as CV – for another, overcoming paralysis to make music with eyes alone.

Bertolt Meyer was already producing and DJing, even with a birth condition that left him without the lower portion of one arm. But he hacked his arm prosthesis to jack control voltage straight into his modular – connecting to synthesis more directly than most before would even imagine.

In the case of Pone, a seminal French hip-hop producer, the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) left the artist without muscle control of his body. Using an eye interface, he has managed to publish a book on the disease.

But he has also turned to music production, connecting open, hackable eye tracking solutions to Ableton Live. The eyes act as a (very slow) mouse – in this case, the screen-and-pointer GUI paradigm of the software is an aid to accessibility. Inspired by Kate Bush, he has made an instrumental album called Kate & Me entirely using his eyes.

And … wow – it’s everything you’d expect from a hip-hop innovator like Pone, astonishing as you think of the effort that went into production. It’s a testament to the power of musical imagination, and the potential of that imagination to connect in any way it can with the outside world.

The album is a free download from the album site:

Kate And Me

Check the release party:

The Guardian has an extensive article on his story. There’s some sobering information, too – like the lack of French insurance support for the condition.

Pone: the paralysed producer making music with his eyes [The Guardian]

There’s not nearly enough attention paid to accessibility in the music tech industry. It’s not some novel edge case – it hits right at the core of what music technology for expression is fundamentally about. (And even accessibility defined in narrow terms is bigger than you think – so for instance 1 in 20 KOMPLETE KONTROL users take advantage of features for the visually impaired.)

I wrote about this in a blog story for Native Instruments, which deals with their products but also a lot about the process for developing these features – it’s relevant to anyone reading here who makes music products. (And even though this deals with vision accessibility, there are lessons relevant to other matters, too.)

Designing for the visually impaired

It’s also worth reading Ashley Elsdon’s writing on the topic, like this story for us:

The KellyCaster reveals what accessibility means for instruments

The post Bionic synthesis: artists make music with a prosthetic arm, eye motion appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Productivity engineering has come to music production. A popular method for timeboxing is now available as a free Live add-on.

Have you ever sighed in relief to have a big, uninterrupted span of time – only to wind up wiling it all away with procrastination? And then have you found yourself with a particular deadline – like an hour left in your music studio before your partner arrives to kick you out – and suddenly find you’re focused?

The basic principle here is that, paradoxically, even as we hate schedules and deadlines, constraints can help us focus. By constraining our time, or timeboxing, we can concentrate more easily on a particular task.

The Pomodoro Technique is this boiled down to a really simple cycle. It’s named for a kitchen timer – you know, the thing often called an egg timer because it’s shaped like an egg, but in this case apparently with a model shaped like a tomato. It’s the late-80s invention of Francesco Cirillo, who I understand even liked the ticking sound. I hate ticking – uh, especially while making music – but sometimes setting a timer can make it easier to tackle a task you’re putting off.

While invented in the late 80s, Pomodoro Technique has spread more widely in the productivity craze of the Internet age. Of course, there’s a Lifehacker guide to getting started. (It was even updated as recently as last summer.) And yes, Francesco is around and will gladly take your money.

Now, it may seem a little strange to do this when you’re working on music, which most of us think of as a diversion. Isn’t music supposed to be endlessly fun and something we can concentrate on without any challenge? But apart from more rote work or making a Max for Live patch or carefully editing envelopes, anything that requires you to focus your brain benefits from breaks.

And that’s really what the Pomodoro Technique is about. It’s not actually the 25 minutes of focus that is the most important. It’s the break. (Perhaps part of why you’re so eager to procrastinate is a legitimate impulse by your brain that you’re overly and unnaturally focused on something.)

There’s plenty of science to back this up. Selecting just one useful overview:

Brief diversions vastly improve focus, researchers find [ScienceDaily summary; original paper in Cognition, 2001]

There are lots and lots of Pomodoro-themed timers out there – or you can use any timer (as on your phone, wristwatch, a physical egg timer, whatever). (The Pomodoro timers sometimes have special features dedicated to the technique, and at least pictures of tomatoes, which as a fan of the veget— erm, fruit – I enjoy.)

pATCHES, a site and Patreon subscription creating resources for producers, has an experimental Max for Live plug-in. Apart from letting you run the thing inside your session, it even stops your transport when you’re due for a break – if you find that useful.

https://patches.zone/max-for-live/pomodoro

I’m curious to hear if people find this useful. It is easy to forget that, as much as we mystify music process, what we’re really taking care of is our brain.

The post Someone made a Pomodoro timer for Ableton Live, so you can stay productive, take breaks appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Get push-button access to your favorite stuff in Ableton Live with this clever Max for Live tool.

Continuing our new year look at some of the coolest Max for Live stuff, flowstate has come up with a tool that lets you map anything in Live’s Browser. If you find yourself frequently using the same instrument, effect, sample, or whatnot, you can now map those to keyboard or MIDI.

The solution is a combination of MIDI Remote Script with Max for Live Device. And it works with almost anything – devices, sounds, third-party plug-ins, basically anything except Live Packs (which don’t support this mapping).

The package is name-your-price, with a £5 minimum.

The developers says instructions and an example set are included, plus 64 button slots pre-mapped to all of the internal Live Suite stuff (MIDI Effects, Audio Effects, and Instruments), including 5 user slots (or remap the whole thing as you wish).

https://gumroad.com/l/SgohV

https://maxforlive.com/library/device/5884/browser-mapper

It’s overkill for me personally, but I imagine it could be really useful to some. And it shows some of the potential of using the Live API and MIDI Remote Scripts to customize Live, so I imagine it might inspire other ideas, too.

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Dark themes are all the rage these days, from phones to desktop OSes. Now it’s time for stuff you use every day to go properly to black, too – hello Ableton Live and SoundCloud.

Okay, dark themes actually have inspired some controversy when it comes to usability and even eye fatigue. But it’s pretty understandable why they’re using in music. Let’s face it – we’re commonly in the dark. Dark themes save battery life, and they’re less disturbing when you’re listening in bed, in darkened studios, onstage – you get the idea.

macOS Mojave added Dark Mode for apps; Windows 10 is (as usual) following piecemeal but has now largely caught up. Recent iOS and Android versions and apps also have added support.

Two apps I use a whole lot – Ableton Live and SoundCloud – weren’t quite there. Live’s dark themes are grayish, but not black (without customization); SoundCloud seems to have adopted its color scheme from the garish white and orange of easyJet. (I swear this was because early on the founders were commuting between Berlin and Stockholm on that airline. I’ve never confirmed this with them because it’s more fun to just make up the story. You know.)

Let’s take these two Berlin-based music tools and drain them of color and light so they’re ready to queue at Berghain. (And probably get rejected, but still, on-message.)

SoundCloud

For websites, Stylish has been a favorite of customization lovers since its debut for Firefox way back in 2005. It’s now graduated from hacker status to something anyone can use, with versions for the new faster Firefox, Chrome (and any Chrome-compatible browser), Safari, Opera, and whatever else you may use. (I’m using it now in Vivaldi, and there’s even a new Android app.)

The official site from developer Jason Barnabe has what you need:

https://userstyles.org

And then you’ll find various options for SoundCloud when you search.

The most popular and up-to-date is Quite Dark:

https://userstyles.org/styles/143738/soundcloud-quite-dark

But I’m partial to “Ultra Dark.” I do find this makes me enjoy using SoundCloud more, recalling black album colors and high-end studio electronics. And in Stylish you can swap themes or disable customization if you find a portion of the admin side when uploading that isn’t skinned.

https://userstyles.org/styles/176264/soundcloud-ultra-dark

Ableton Live

Live for me is more necessity – the wrong theme can be blinding under weird club conditions, and I find equally hard to focus on in the studio.

Wait, I’m writing that, and lately I haven’t been playing with Ableton Live onstage. So, okay – maybe it’s just aesthetics. But let’s do it anyway. Sometimes just varying the scheme can help you get over two decades of using this tool.

We’ve covered Live skins before – the most comprehensive source remains the wonderful Sonic Bloom site, which also handles customization techniques and other information. But I wanted something extreme, which right now means going to long-running fan art gallery Deviant Art. (It’s another holdover from the Beforetimes, when the Internet didn’t totally suck so much.)

And Dark 2 is totally delicious for those of us who want extreme blackness. (Blackest ever black?)

https://www.deviantart.com/anthonymilano/art/SKIN-Dark-2-for-Ableton-Live-10-735023504

Thanks to creator anthonymilano, whoever you are, for this gem. Image from his page, which also includes install intructions.

More ideas?

What else do you want to go dark?

Bitwig Studio already has a pretty blackened scheme by default; I actually haven’t gotten as far as customizing it yet. (Anyway?) Ditto Renoise.

I was going to add Reaper to the list but they went and overhauled the customization of the themes in Reaper 6, so it’s a little premature.

But I bet our readers have loads of ideas. Fire away.

Now someone really needs to bring back the reverse-lettered “evil” t-shirt for Ableton Live. I love that I even got asked by an airline flight crew about that.

The post Here’s how to add proper dark themes for Ableton Live, SoundCloud, embrace darkness appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

mutateful brings live coding – real-time musical pattern manipulation, expressed as code – to Ableton Live. And it looks like a must-have for arrangement and composition, too.

So yes, there are knobs and faders and pads and keys and wind inputs and whatnot for playing music live. And then there are the often clunky graphical interfaces found in music software. The core of live coding is all about finding that immediacy of compositional ideas – being able to get directly to patterns.

mutateful lets you do that by typing directly into the Session View of Ableton Live. That paradigm isn’t new to Live – the software already lets you enter tempo changes in scenes by including the number. mutateful just takes that idea way further out.

Type transformations into clips, and those clips then transform patterns inside the clips. You can add simple transformations, or chain a bunch together.

Some of the tasks those transformations can accomplish:

• Arpeggiate
• Combine clips (in various ways)
• Change length (via cropping or setting to certain lengths)
• Filter out notes by length
• Remove silences
• Remove overlaps, making polyphonic clips monophonic
• Quantize
• Create stuttering retriggers
• Rescale pitches
• Shuffle
• Slice notes into divisions
• Transpose

And you can do all of this by clip, musical fractions (like 1/8 notes), and whole or decimal numbers.

Watch just how cool this is:

It’s a pretty radical addition to Live, and arguably more radical than anything we’ve seen officially from Ableton Live in the software itself for years. But it’s still fairly simple.

I almost hesitate to categorize this as live coding, because it looks really useful in arrangement relative to the GUI, and you might not use it as a livecoder would onstage. (I do expect this means people will invade live coding events running this, though.)

Documentation is limited to a quick reference, but it’s fairly easy to follow and more is coming.

How it works: it’s actually a native app, made for macOS and Windows, which then communicates with the Live API via Max for Live and UDP. That means the usual qualification is involved – you’ll need the latest version of Ableton Live and a license for Max for Live (either separately or as part of Live Suite). That could open up this idea to other software with APIs / scripting interfaces of their own.

You can grab it from GitHub and check out more examples:

https://github.com/carrierdown/mutateful

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Mobile keyboards continue to be fruitful and multiply. But Novation’s latest includes standalone mode, so it isn’t just a computer accessory – so let’s see how this category looks now.

Novation is the company that brought you the workhorse Launchpad grid, so anyone wanting a keyboard with colored grids on it would do well to take notice. But the MK3 adds some features its predecessors lacked – starting with the ability to work with gear minus the computer. New on the MK3:

• Standalone mode and MIDI. There’s just a 3.5mm MIDI out jack, but combined with functionality that works without a host, you can now use this little keyboard with gear and not just a computer.
• Fixed chord mode. Even for those of us with keyboard chops, this is useful on a small keyboard or in dance music contexts. New on the MK3.
• Arpeggiator. New on the MK3, and puts the Novation in contention with offerings labeled Akai and Arturia.
• Pitch/mod wheel. MK3 adds these as touch strips; the Launchkey 25/49/61 have pitch and mod, but it’s new on the Mini line.
• RGB backlight. Yes, yes, more disco lights – but this also shows more information, matching colors to clips you’re launching and indicating status. Also new on MK3.

There’s also a Capture MIDI button, which lets you grab ideas even if you haven’t hit record. That’s now in Ableton Live, too, but it’s great that with the keyboard, this works everywhere.

And existing standard features from the Launchkey mini are here too:

• Scene/clip launch (for Ableton and Novation software – this is a Launchpad).
• Velocity sensitive keys and pads. Also standard on the Launchkey line. Velocity is actually missing on the Launchpad mini, meaning if you want triggering and velocity, this is a better bet.
• Bus power.

There’s additionally now a bunch of bundled stuff from AAS, Softube, Spitfire Audio, XLN Audio and Klevgrand, and Novation now does a free membership. No, that isn’t some elaborate “cloud/subscription” feature – they just send you stuff from partners “every couple of months,” which may be more what you want, anyway.

https://novationmusic.com/keys/launchkey-mini

This does make the Novation offering competitive, no doubt – not least because of Novation’s uniquely close relationship to Ableton Live, but likely just as useful with other DAWs (via Mackie HUI, which works with just about anything).

Here’s a hands-on review by loopop:

This also to me gives it a major edge over, say, Native Instruments’ keyboards, which work only when connected to a computer. That makes their Komplete Kontrol line desirable if you’re mainly interested in plug-in integration, but fairly useless if you want it to do double-duty with gear and not have to boot your laptop.

And that’s true of many other keyboards, too. Akai’s APC and MPK mini keyboards have some nice features and low prices, but they only work with a computer. (The MPK mini now has standalone sounds, but no MIDI out apart from USB.) And now Novation has added one of the features I like best on the MPK – the arpeggiator.

So this is really down to Arturia and Novation if you want something you can use on its own with your gear, as well as with a computer.

Arturia’s Keystep has a step sequencer and more dedicated arpeggiator functionality and controls. It lacks the pads and their accompanying trigger/DAW features.

So Novation gives you a still-usable arpeggiator but additional pad and trigger features.

Previously:

Arturia’s KeyStep just got way more useful

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Signal from Isotonik was already a revelation – a powerful toolkit for adding modulation to Ableton Live. But curves, step sequences, and crossfades add real motion and transformation to your music.

Darren of Isotonik Studios has been busy documenting how to use this with some no-nonsense, clear video tutorials. It’s the latest episode, adding Steps and Crossfader module, that gets really exciting:

The new module Steps alone is reason to write home. It’s capable both of the titular step-sequenced, fixed steps, but curves, as well. And while you’ll find modulation built in in tools like FL Studio, Reason, and Bitwig Studio, the implementation via Max for Live by Isotonik has some really lovely usability that stands alone.

The Crossfader is unique, too – this isn’t just a mixer for audio signals, but modulation sources, as well.

It’s worth checking the other videos, too. Episode two looked at the cult hit VST plug-in Serum, creating sound design with Signal in combination. And even with Massive X just out, this is some interesting stuff:

You’ll probably want to start at the beginning, which introduces Freeze and LFO (since I’m listing these in reverse chronological order):

You’ll notice the Chaos Culture moniker on there; this is their creation. You’ll probably want Live 10 Suite, but anything Live 9.7.5 or later, plus an active Max for Live 8.0.2 license, will work, across Mac and Windows.

It’s so deep, it suggests whole new workflows and compositional ideas, so I’ll be sure to start some music from scratch with this one. But it’s really quite well done, and a rich enough approach to modulation that developers on other environments may well want to have a look.

Signal is €88.05 – pricey for a Max for Live creation, but then possibly even bigger than any recent Live upgrade from Ableton themselves. If you have a go, let us know how it works; I’ll try to post some more impressions in August.

https://isotonikstudios.com/product/signal/

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For all the app choices in music, a lot feel like plug-ins crammed onto the mobile screen. Auxy may have the essential combination of ingredients – a simple, quick UI, but now the ability to make sketches you finish in Ableton Live, and sounds you can more easily tweak.

Auxy always had an elegant, approachable UI. The tool basically strips the essential function of the familiar piano roll-style view so you can quickly sketch ideas with your fingertips.

But just being simple isn’t quite enough. Mobile apps all face the common problem of having to satisfy two very different use cases or workflows. Some people want to focus on music making right on the phone or tablet, stay away from their computers (or other gear), and yet make finished tracks. Others want the app to be a rough sketchpad for ideas they can use on the go, then finish in the more comfortable environs of their computer rig or studio. The problem is, of course, those come with different demands.

Swedish app Auxy has had two updates that address some of these cases.

First, Auxy 5.4 in April added direct export to Ableton Live projects. Cleverly, this exports both audio and MIDI, so you retain your sound designs from the app as stems, but can also use patterns to work with new sounds inside Live.

Auxy 5.4 also represents a new high water mark for Ableton’s SDK. Auxy encouraged Ableton to add features for populating the Arrangement, so that song ideas and arranging choices you make on the go are reflected when you open up your project in Live. These features will be available to other developers, too, so if you’re a dev, you can get in touch with Ableton. (And that’s important, too – the better this support works in different apps, the more useful mobile-to-Live workflows become.)

5.4 also added improved import/export for samples, imported samples that share when you share projects, and updated Ableton Link support.

Auxy 6 is a major update just released this month, focusing on giving you more control over sounds and effects. And that addresses the other thing that might have kept you from adopting Auxy in the past – the simplicity is great, but you might feel constrained by the available sounds.

Auxy launched as a kind of preset machine. That makes things simpler, but might be uninspiring if you feel like you can’t shape your own sounds. That changes with some significant features:

More effects for instrumental sounds: distortion, delay, reverb, chorus, filter, ducker, and EQ sounds everywhere – customizable, not locked to presets.

More effects for drums, too: delay, distortion, compressor, filter, EQ, and ducker are now available on drums.

Shape sound envelopes: attack, release, glide, offset. (works on drums, too)

Free grid mode: move notes and automation freely as you edit.

Browse sounds by category.

This isn’t going to sound so revolutionary, but of course that is always the challenge when trying to keep things simple – there’s a lot to think about adding even simple features.

All in all, Auxy has really evolved into one of the easiest, most elegant sketchpads for music on mobile. There’s many things it isn’t – it’s not really about live playing, it’s not a full-featured DAW (and doesn’t try to be), it’s not really an audio multitrack. But what it is, it really focuses on. And with Live export, that could prove invaluable.

Auxy regularly select favorite user tracks, which is a nice way to get a feel for what people are doing. Here are the Staff Picks for last month:

Plus one creation made in this latest release:

Check out Auxy for iOS (no Android version, sorry):

https://auxy.co/

The post Music on the go – Auxy app now has tweakable sounds, Ableton export appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

It’s one of the first challenges with any modular – you get a wild banging groove, but then… you’re stuck with it. One new video tutorial suggests a way to arrange your modular with Ableton Live and free VCV Rack software.

Live’s real-time arrangement and triggering features have always been part of its appeal – something exploited by everyone from live electronic musicians to those triggering sounds for radio and theater. Here, it’s a great way to take your cabled modular concoctions and actually turn them into a song structure or live performance. But it may not be immediately obvious to beginners how to go about it.

The inspiring VCV Rack ideas comes to the rescue here. It’s been updated for the just-release VCV Rack 1.0.

Now the audio advice here is actually soon to become outdated – Bridge will go away later this year, and you’ll be able to run Rack as a plug-in. But you can actually skip that part if you want to go another route, and just let Rack control your audio interface and send MIDI from Ableton Live.

(You could also apply this on Linux easily, with Bitwig Studio in place of Live – think I’ll try that myself, in fact.)

But the basic idea here is, run MIDI from Live to Rack, and use clips and scenes to trigger changes. There are some clever ideas about how to map control via CV and MIDI, and then the really important step is adding a physical controller, so you can get your hands on the live performance and improvise.

Note that while this example uses VCV Rack, you could apply the same ideas to any modular with MIDI input – or even mix in a partial or complete hardware set with the same rig. And watching this I also imagine some other ideas for where to go; this is by definition an open-ended process. Have a look:

Have you got another way of working? We’d love to hear about it in comments.

By the way, if you’re at SONAR this week, I’ll be giving a workshop with VCV Rack on Friday. (You need a delegate pass / pre-registration. But of course I’ll share some of how it goes here on CDM soon.)

https://sonarplusd.com/en/programs/barcelona-2019/areas/workshops/the-no-money-modular-synth-for-beginners-with-peter-kirn

Previously:

VCV Rack hits 1.0; why you need this free modular now

The post Learn how to arrange your modular tracks with VCV Rack, Ableton Live appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

It’s an automatic glitching bass. It’s a transformative set of 128 Wavetable sounds. It’s a Max for Live chaining device. It’s all of that – it’s Leakage, the free/pay-what-you-will Ableton Live creation from Tom Cosm.

The idea is to give you ever-changing bassline sounds each time you hit a note, for colorful and glitchy results. To pull that off, you get a number of features:

• 128 custom Wavetable presets
• Max for Live device that switches sounds
• Preset switching, via chains – 128 chains, one for each sound
• 8 parameters per sound: chain, filter amount, filter attack, filter decay, “grunt” (wavetable morphing), modulation amount, modulation rate, “special alpha” (per-sound parameter)
• Set number of steps, up to 128, to determine rate of change
• “Count MIDI” sets the step size to the number of notes in the active clip
• Velocity-based switching

Watch:

Tom says this is the culmination of five years of work, but he’s been waiting for Ableton Live 10.1 and the processing bandwidth of current machines to unleash this. You’ll need of course Live 10.1 with Wavetable and a Max for Live license (probably, but not limited to, Suite).

This is pay what you want, starting at $0 to download. If you do put in some money, you’ll be added to an early access list for promised future editions, with bassline, lead, and effect features.

It’s really encouraging to hear Tom talk about how well that’s worked:

“To be honest, it blew my mind how many of you made a contribution. People chipped in 1, 2 or 5 bucks… but a lot of you did! It was so much it covered my rent and bills for a month, freeing up my time so I could work on this Leakage release. I was totally blown away by the generosity, so I am going to keep rolling with this system. Even if it’s just 2 dollars, it all adds up and means I can keep pumping out new and exciting tools, without having to restrict the availability to people who have money.”

Check it out:

Leakage from Tom Cosm [Gumroad]

The post Leakage is a freaky Ableton Live bass machine, Wavetable monster, from $0 appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Now, even your browser can produce elaborate, production-grade eye candy using just some Ableton Live MIDI clock. The question of how to generate visuals to go with music starts to get more and more interesting answers.

And really, why not? In that moment of inspiration, how many of us see elaborate fantastic imagery as we listen to (or dream about) music. It’s just been that past generative solutions were based on limited rules, producing overly predictable results. (That’s the infamous “screensaver” complaint.) But quietly, even non-gaming machines have been adding powerful 3D visualization – and browsers now have access to hardware acceleration for a uniform interface.

cables.gl remains in invite-only beta, though if you go request one (assuming this article doesn’t overwhelm one), you can find your way in. And for now, it’s also totally free, making this a great way to play around. (Get famous, get paid, buy licenses for this stuff – done.)

MIDI clock can run straight into the browser, so you can sync visuals easily with Ableton Live. (Ableton Link is overkill for that application, given that visuals run at framerate.) That will work with other software, hardware, modular, whatever you have, too.

For a MIDI/DJ example, here’s a tutorial for TRAKTOR PRO. Obviously this can be adapted to other tools, as well. (Maybe some day Pioneer will even decide to put MIDI clock on the CDJ. One can dream.)

They’ve been doing some beautiful work in tutorials, too, including WeaveArray and ColorArray, since I last checked in.

The post How to patch 3D visuals in browser from Ableton Live, more with cables.gl appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.