I spent most of last week at NAMM in Anaheim, doing Max For Live demonstrations with Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. It was a wonderful trip, with the majority of my time spent speaking about two of my favorite tools for making sound and vision: Max/MSP/Jitter and Live. NAMM itself was the usual mix of marketing and musicians, and I met an entire crew of amazing friends, new and old. In terms of devices, I was particularly taken by Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 and Eigenlabs Eigenharp.
Above you can see me, Gregory Taylor and Andrew Benson at the Cycling ‘74 area, a space shared with Ableton. I had expected high interest in Max For Live from users on the Ableton side of the road, who would be well-versed in the use of Live but not so familiar with Max. There were many in this group. Somewhat surprisingly, many Live users had already embraced and extended with Max For Live and brought us deep questions about its use, techniques and possibilities. Add the Max users moving their immense toolboxes of tricks into Max For Live and every conversation was a new treasure.
Here’s Huston Singletary of Ableton introducing me before one of the Max For Live sessions. I ran through demos with the Big Three from Max For Live (Loop Shifter, Step Sequencer, Buffer Shuffler), then talked about how to construct a set for live performance using these monsters and a small army of custom devices I’ve created for my own composition and performance: a Monome clip-triggering interface with offset for stacking an entire evening of tracks in one Live set; a Max for Live drum rack built from many different synthesis types with randomizing parameters and probability gates; an audio gate with recombinant sequencing of states; a randomizing, sequenced delay with pitch shift.
I rocked a minimal hardware setup: Korg NanoKontrol, Monome 40h and a spanky new MIDIfighter. Since the controllers were minimal, I played a stripped down version of a new Wolf Interval track for the short performance, extended after each day with some new bits of audio I grabbed with my PCM-D50 from around the convention center and various NAMM-related events and gatherings.
It was such a terrific time, the week tried hard not to end. Flying out, my flight on Virgin was delayed by inclement weather. I ended up connecting with other unexpectedly waiting Max and Live users before, during and after the short jump home to San Francisco.
