Recording - June 2013 - 21

folders, you can add as many as you want,
and name them. Bundled software instrument presets in Live can be previewed the
same way as samples now, so you don’t
have to load instruments into a free MIDI
Track to audition them—a major time-saver.
Getting into Clips
Live has offered full automation tools for its
linear Arrangement View for a long time; you
could go in and draw in automation curves
with a pencil tool for any Track as part of an
Arrangement. However, most of the real
heavy lifting in Live is done in the now-familiar Session View, consisting of a grid of Clips
that can be fired alone or in Scenes.
With the addition of automation at the
Clip level in Session View, Live now offers
hugely expanded creative possibilities.
Automation can be recorded for MIDI and
Audio Clips, and can be applied to any Live
device (including Max For Live devices), not
just third-party plug-ins. You can draw
automation data freehand as you’ve always
been able to do, but there are now easy
controls for lines and curves as well.
New Transform Tools have been added
to MIDI Clips, like Invert, Reverse, Double
and Half length stretch/squeeze, legato
note length adjustment, and simple toggling between working by selected notes

and working by span of time (beats and
bars). A button called Dupl. Loop takes all
data in the Clip, copies it, and pastes it in
at the end of the Clip, doubling its length
with a “clone” of the existing loop that can
then be edited note by note.
This is a good time to mention a true
unsung hero of Live 9... the massive simplification of automation (and many other) key
commands. Where before you might have
to use modifier keys like Alt or Option with
a letter to call up a tool or switch views, now
many common operations are activated
with a single keypress. Sound trivial? Ask
anyone who does serious work with Live
how much time this streamlining process
saves. Mark reports, “Now that I’ve gotten
used to the new workflow, which is exceptional for laptop users, going back to Live 8
is almost painful!”
Controllers unleashed
Live 9 is far more intelligent about distributing MIDI Control Change data from
control surfaces than previous versions,
where if you assigned a MIDI CC to one
parameter, it was mapped globally over
all devices in a Project. Now each device
can accept and interpret its own MIDI data
for vastly expanded control capability.

Live 9 lets you hot-swap USB controllers
with nary a glitch, with no more need to
restart. Speaking of hot swapping, you
can now hot-swap Live instrument patches
with a touch of the Q key. And if you’re
working with a complex signal chain, perhaps with a MIDI Effect controlling input to
a software instrument that’s then followed
by audio effects, you can go through the
chain and activate/bypass each component with the arrow keys and the 0 key,
which is a general-purpose toggle for turning almost anything on and off. You can
even use it to temporarily deactivate
Clips... yet another massive time-saver.
Max For Live comes into its own
Max as a programming language has
been around for decades. Cycling’74
has gradually expanded it from a basic
set of MIDI manipulation tools to include
audio and video toolsets as well (formerly called MSP and Jitter), a full creative
language for working with all sorts of performance material. With Max For Live,
these tools were made available for use
inside Live 8, but the implementation in
Live 9 feels like it’s finally come home.
My experience with Max For Live
(“M4L”) in Live 8 was always a cautious
one; it felt to some extent like I was working

with a separate program that coexisted
uneasily with Live, and because M4L
devices weren’t easy to find and use in the
Browser, I tended to shy away from the
experimentation that Max users have
always adored. But with Live 9, Max For
Live devices are now accessible with one
Browser click and completely transparent to
use. M4L does require a separate installer,
but once installed it’s just there, and M4L
devices can be searched, added, used,
and automated like any other device.
Mark says, “You’ll want to start with
Max For Live Essentials, a free download
from the Ableton Pack Shop. These
devices provide a great introduction to
what you can do with Max For Live and
are also great tools for non-programmers.
They’re so polished and solid that I find I
use them all the time on new projects.”
There are over 2000 devices available
on maxforlive.com, but even if you don’t
want to go hunting, Live 9 Suite comes with
dozens of fantastically usable devices. You
can add Max For Live to Live 9 Standard,
but it comes bundled in Live 9 Suite.

http://www.maxforlive.com http://www.transaudiogroup.com/drawmer

Recording - June 2013

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