Ultimate Ableton Live 12, Part 7: Max for Live

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone, welcome to Ableton Live 12 Part seven. The final the final countdown. Last one in this Giant series, in this class, we're going to focus exclusively on Max four Live. This is one of my favorite things. I've said this 100 times before. I love talking about Max for Live. I love teaching it. So we're going to start by learning about what Max is, what you can do with Max, about the Max community, and we're going to learn how to find things that people have already made that you can use and modify for free. Then we're going to get into how to build stuff with Max. How Max works. Max is basically a programming language that's designed for audio and Mi applications. And you can build your own apps, you can build your own plug ins, you can build your own tools. We'll get into learning the language, learning how it works. We're going to build some fun kind AI type random midi generators that end up sounding like really weirdly beautiful, and I'll give you those patches that we make along the way. And then we're going to close by building one of my super favorite little effects that no one knows about. It's just my little secret weapon. So we're going to build that in this class. It's going to be super fun. Again, I'll give you that project to make as well. Max for Live is a giant topic. So in this class, we're really just going to scratch on the surface of it, but I promise you, by the end of this class, you'll understand how to learn Max, which means I'm going to give you all the tools to understand how to do some fun things in Max and pick up where we leave off on your own. So It's core. Max is, I like to think of it as a programming language for people who are not very good at programming. That's probably really insulting to a lot of people. Okay. Up next, the radio head patch or more accurately, the radio head patch is. So Johnny Greenwood, the guitarist of radio head, and some would argue kind of one of the masterminds behind radio head. Totally random. We're just letting the computer randomly make music for us here. Hey, listen to this all day. 2. The Different Versions of Max: Okay. So over the years, Max has existed in a bunch of different versions, but let's talk about where we are right now. So where we are right now is really two main versions of Max. There is Max, MAX as its own standalone thing. You can download Max as its own environment, sort of programming language. And you can make stuff in it. And you can save those things as applications and you can build stuff that, you know, you can sell. It's great. So that's Max as its own thing. Then there's Max for Live, which is a version of Max that exists within Live. When it comes to what it can do, what you can build, they are functionally the same. In fact, you can get the full version to run within live if you own the full version. Okay. But as far as I can tell, there's nothing limited in the Max for Live version. There's a couple of things you can't do in the Max for Live version, but not because it's limited, just because it doesn't make sense to do them. Max for Live exists in live, and it doesn't like to reach outside of live very well, whereas Max can do a little bit more across different applications, I think. But functionally, what you need to worry about, they're basically the same, what you can do. The language, all the objects, all that stuff that we're going to learn in this class. It's the same in one or the other. Which, to me, says, when in doubt, you should always be working in the Max for live version because it's going to be a lot easier to actually make music with it, whatever you build. So two main versions that exist now, which is funny because there were so many different things like Max used to have these big long names, and I'll walk you through that in the little history thing that I'm going to do, but now we're really down to just two main versions. 3. Installing Max / What You Need: Okay. Okay, let's talk about installing Max and what you need. So this is actually really easy. You can just go to cycling 70 four.com and install Max that way, if you want, but you don't need to. That would be for the standalone version, which will also work in Max for Live. That's one way to do it. The slightly more complicated way. Here's the easier way. If you have Live suite, you probably already have Max for Live. If you go to this button here, Max for Live, and you see a bunch of stuff, you have Max for Live. We can double check by going to our live settings. And go to files and folder, file and folder, Max application. And then we've got two options here, basically. Use bundled version. That's the version that comes with live suite, or you can hit browse here and point it to the full version if you have a full version. Now, I'm going down to the bundled version here, even though I do have the full version, but I've kind of downgraded myself so that you see the same thing that you're going to see. So I'm assuming everyone here is using the bundled version. It comes with suite, And if you don't have suite, I believe you can go to the live website and get it. Maybe even you can get it here on PAC Here's Max for Live essentials. You might be able to add it on to intro or standard. I'm not really sure. They kind of keep changing the rules on that a little bit. But if you have suite, it comes with it. And it'll already be installed. You can go to that settings to double check that you have it installed, you should be able to use the bundled version. That's what you want to do. 4. The "1 in 10" Rule: Okay, last thing on this preamble, and then we'll get into it. I really just want to say, what is Max. But before I do that, I want to tell you one funny story about Max. Not really a story, but just a phenomenon that I've found. I've been teaching Max in college and online for probably 15 years now. And one thing that I see in every college class that I teach Max in is there's this one and ten rule that I see. And that is that if I have a class of ten people, then nine of them are going to hate Max. It's just not going to work well with their brain. It's a weird thing. But then that one person, that one in ten, Max is going to totally change their life, and they're going to just start making stuff and doing everything in their life with Max. That was me when I was a student, and that might be you. But if you're one of those nine people, just hang on, learn what it is and what you can do with it. Then if you decide not to study it, that's fine. You can use Live and be awesome at Live and not know how to use Max for Live. There's a whole bunch of the Ableton certified trainer community. Whole bunch of those folks don't know how to use Max hardly at all. And that's okay because you can still be an expert live user without knowing Max. But if you are an expert live user and you know Max, you have superpowers. So keep that in mind. Okay. Here we go. Okay. 5. Max in a Nutshell: Okay. What is Max Max for Live. Max and Max for Live, I'm going to use interchangeably here. So when I say Max, we're talking about Max for Live. Let's take a look at its core, Max I like to think of it as a programming language for people who are not very good at programming. That's probably really insulting to a lot of people. I probably shouldn't say it that way. But if you if you've looked at any programming language before where you're writing lines of text. You're not going to be doing any of that. Don't worry. So let me show you what it looks like. Here I've loaded in this Max for Live patch onto this midi track. This is called bouncy notes. What it's going to do is I'm going to play a chord here and we're going to see the notes, and I'm just going to start bouncing and I can do fun stuff with them. Okay. It's kind of neat, right? I've got all these different parameters I can do and whatever. But the thing that makes this one different is I've got different than a normal effect. So I've got this little button right here. I'm going to click on it, and now it's going to launch Max for Live. This is going to let me open this up and do some fun stuff with it. Let's make this window nice and big. Now I'm going to open it up and just look at the raw code. All right. It doesn't look like there's much here, cool, but there is a lot more here. Each of these little boxes can be opened up to more stuff. Here's some more complicated stuff. But this is what the code looks like for x. You've got boxes and you're connecting boxes to other boxes. It's not unlike if you are a guitar player and you use a bunch of effects, and you've got your guitar plugs into your distortion, which plugs into your delay, which plugs into a volume pedal, maybe and then plugs into your amp. It's not unlike that except take that and make it times 1,000 because we've got a signal and then it's running through this box, and then we connect it to that box and that box and that box. So it's just connecting a bunch of boxes. But they get quite complicated and can have different things in them. Where did that one? Let's go to here. Okay, so each little box, you can kind think of as its own little program, and we can connect things together to make more complicated things happen. So we can basically do anything as long as we can find an object that'll help us do it. And object is the word for each of these little boxes. Most of the little boxes we're seeing. Okay. So sometimes people will say things like, you know, can you launch a rocket ship with Max? I would say, Yes, actually, quite easily. If you give me a rocket ship and have a way to connect it to a computer, I could launch it with Max. There are ways to get crazy data, like the weather in Tokyo and, you know, have your delay amount be the dew point of you know, weather in Tokyo. That's an example I always use, and it's quite doable. So you can really do anything you can imagine. There's people always making more Max objects for us to play with. There's a huge community. So there's always more tools to get. I'll talk to you about that community in just a minute, but that's what Max does in a nutshell. That's what it's all about. With all of these little boxes, we can connect them and make our own effects and synths and drum machines, sounds, whatever you want. 6. Learning Max: Okay. Before we go on to the next section, I just want to say something about learning Max. Max is huge, huge, huge. I told you before, I've been using Max for over 15 years, and I am still learning new things about Max all the time. Partly because it updates, and there are new things you can do with it, but also partly just because it's just too big to learn. And it's definitely too big to learn in a four or five hour class like we're doing here. So I have a method. What we're going to do is we're going to learn how to learn Max, okay? So I'm going to show you how to do some stuff in Max. Along the way, I'm going to show you how to find out more things, how to dig deeper, okay? What that's going to do is make it so that when you have a project in mind, something you want to build, I want you to know how to find the tools that you need, okay? So everything we do is from that perspective. I'm trying to not only show you how to do something, but how to find out how to do more. Now, I do have a whole bunch of other max classes that go deeper than what we're able to go into in this single class here. So check those out. There is a three class max sequence. That I'm really quite proud of. I'm really happy with how that turned out. So check that out. In this class, we're going to go into the guts of Max. First, we're going to talk about how to find Max projects get involved in the Max Maker community. Okay. And then we'll go into how to do some programming and build some of your own tools. But again, the goal is for you to learn how to make stuff in a way that you understand how to learn how to do more. Cool? I know it's a weird concept, but just trust me on it. Okay, let's learn a bit on the history of Max and then we'll get into what this interface does and what it means. 7. A Brief History of Max: Okay. Let's talk about a brief history of Max, where it comes from and the weird route it took to get here. Why? Why is this relevant to us? Because it's interesting, and I like talking about it. So here we go. So there was this guy, his name is Miller Pocket? No. There was this composer. His name is Philip Marie. No that's not a good starting spot either. Let's start with ERC. So, C is well, first of all, before I dive into this, let me just say that This is the story, as I understand it. There may be an official story somewhere. There may be people with more direct experience, but this is everything I know. So there is this place called RCM IR CAM. It still exists. It is in Paris in the Pompado Center, and it is a place where a lot of the technology related to music production was birthed. It is basically a computer music think tank. It's a government funded institution. The acronym RCM stands for something in French. I can't remember exactly, but basically Institute for research in composition and electronic music, something like that. So the way it worked in the early days and I think it still does is that They would put together these teams of three people. So there would be a composer and a programmer and an engineer. So they would bring in a composer and they would say to the composer, what do you want to do when your wildest dreams? What would you like to be able to make? And the composer would say, I want flying toasters that shoot lasers, and that triggers a Glockenspiel, and it plays a melody. Whatever. So then the engineer and the programmer would sit around and say, m, okay, how can we do this? And then they would build the thing required to make that a reality. So at some point, composer, a French composer named Philip Mani comes in and they say, what do you want to be able to do? Many says something like I want the computer to be able to follow along with the musician, not just have the computer playback of file and have a musician play along to it like karaoke style, which is how everything was done at that point, that point. I probably should have said, this is around probably 1985 or six that this is happening. So very early days of electronic music. So Man said, I don't want the computer to just play some bleeps and bloops and have a live musician play along to that as a duet. I want the computer to listen and respond. Adjust its tempo. So the programmer assigned to this task was a guy named Miller Puckett. And the piece that Phillip Moni ended up writing was a piece called Put which I have a very crude score of here. Okay. So what Miller Puckett came up with was a system where basically, he would write a program where it would kind of count notes. It would listen for notes and count them and trigger different things to happen at different points. But he went one step further. Let's expand on a max patch here. So we have Phillip Manner. And Miller Puckett. Okay. Both at ERC Okay. So Puckett says, Well, this is cool, but I'm kind of getting sick of, like, making something for every composer that comes in here. So I'm going to make something that's kind of modular, and I can adapt it to do other things later. So that gives him the idea for a very crude version of Max. What we have here. It's got all these little programs that we can connect together to do things, right? So he initially designed it for Philip Mary, but it was designed to be modular so that it could be used for a lot of different ideas and a lot of different pieces of music. Okay. So because Puckett was working for ERCO, it was owned by ERCO, and it was released to members of CO. You could become a member, and I think you still can become a member of ERCO and get releases of some of the projects that they're working on in a thing called the ERCO Forum. So it was released to members of the ERCO forum in 1989. And it really only did Mit could it could count notes, I could send MIT messages, and therefore trigger samples and things like that in other devices, but it couldn't do it couldn't do effects. It couldn't do signal processing, anything like that. It was really just Mt stuff. Okay. So then, also around 1989, a new player enters the picture. A company called Opcode. Well, Opcode was, I believe a US company, and they were a software maker. They made an early DA, which I think was called What was it? Studio logic or something like that. So they had a. They eventually bought a license to Max so that they could sell it as a commercial product. So they started selling it and and working on it, updating it, making it look better, giving it more functionality. And one of the engineers who was hired to work on that was a guy named David Zikerll. So he was an employee of Opcode tasked with developing this product a little bit more to be a more sellable. So in the later 90s, at this point, Max is selling. It's not a huge money maker because it's very specific and very niche. So opcode, Okay. Goes out of business. ACO goes out of business. Boop, I don't know why I'm connecting those. Whatever. I'm connecting these just for fun. ACO goes out of business, but David Zico, being an entrepreneurial dude buys Max from the going out of business opcode and he starts a company called Cycling 74. I don't know why it's called that. We could probably find out, but I don't know why it's called. 1999, Zicarelli starts cycling 74 and their sole thing is Max. That's all they do. Now, an interesting thing that I skipped over that I want to jump back to is at some point, Miller Puckett, said, you know, this Max thing that I wrote for arcm it was cool, but I could do better. I could remake that whole program in a better way. So he makes a new program called PD. PD supposedly stands for pure data. Some say it stands for public domain because this is free. It's a free version of essentially Max. It still exists. It's out there. You could get it. However, it doesn't work in live, the same way that Max does, and it's significantly harder to use. It's uglier. But if you want to experiment with something free, Try it out. You can download it. So Miller Pocket starts working on PD. Okay, back to Cycling 74. This was about 1996, I think. So Cycling 74 under Zeke starts expanding, Max. And saying, Like the Max product was cool, but let's add some stuff. Let's add the ability to do signal processing. So they come up with this thing called MSP to add to it. So now the product is called Max MSP. And it looks like this. Max plus MSP is Max MSP. Cool. MSP does signal processing, and that means audio stuff. It can now do audio effects. It can listen to audio, it can generate audio. Synthesis, all kinds of stuff. Now, what does MSP stand for? Well, the person who developed MSP was actually our old friend Miller Puckett. He's the one who made this. Let's see if I can make this ale. Okay. How about that? So Miller Puckett made MSP for cycling 74. So supposedly, no one knows exactly for sure what MSP stands for, but Puckett has said on different occasions, one of three different things. Number one, and most likely is Max signal processing. The signal processing element to Max. Number two, the initials of its creator, Miller Puckett, possible. And number three and least likely, but I like it anyway is the airport code for his hometown Minneapolis St. Paul, which happens to also be where I am at the moment. Okay, so that was cool. And then years go by. And eventually, the need to develop a set of video tools for Max arises. And so we create they create cycling 74 creates something called Jitter. So now the name of the program is Max MSP Jitter, So Max MSP plus J. And I don't know who the authors of Jitter are. I know one of them was a guy named Jeremy Bernstein, doesn't matter. There's a lot of people, probably. Now, prior to Jitter Jitter was written, I think a little bit in response to a third party, somebody else made a set of video extensions for Max. And those were called NATO I'm not making this up. Oops. These are pluses, 50 53d. NATO, as we commonly say it, was a set of video extensions, and these people the people behind this were probably the first cyber terrorists or if not, cyber bullies, for sure that we all learned about. It was a very weird time and very strange. I won't go into full details here, but Google this and you'll find some really fascinating stuff. So Jer kind of put them out of business. So let's just leave that floating by itself over there. Okay, so that leads us up to about 20:15 when we suddenly get Ableton entering the picture. Ableton Company is a company that makes live, push a couple other products. And Ableton partners to create Max for Live, a version of live that runs within Max. Now live Max MSP plus Ableton equals Max for Live. Basically. Let's give us a little bit more space because we're almost done then that is so successful and works so well that eventually, the Ableton Company acquires cycling 74. And I think that was 2015. So now Ableton owns cycling 74. So let's take all of this and this and put it down here. Cool. So Ableton is now the owner of cycling 74. Cycling 74 still kind of operates as its own company as far as I can tell, but it is owned by Ableton as of now. So the two main products, as I've already talked about are Max Five and Max MSP Jitter, which is more commonly at this point, abbreviated to just Max. And that's the standalone version and the Max for Live version. There are other things. There are a bunch of other things that cycling 74 makes at this point. Most of them are add ons or related to Max, but they have a couple of special things that are not. And you should check those out. They're all really interesting, but we're going to focus on Max. That is the long and strange history of how Max and Max for Live came to be. 8. The Max User Community: Okay, so in this section of the class, I want to talk about some tools for finding max patches. And also, I'm going to go over kind of three famous max patches. Okay. So the best place to find Max patches and just to learn more about Max is the Max user community. Now, when I started using Max, and for a long time thereafter, Max was a real secretive thing. Like people didn't talk about using Max because it was their secret weapon. You would build a tool in Max that it was your tool and you were the only one who had access to it. That was true for a long time, and it was actually, I think, a big problem for cycling 74 because it was like reverse word of mouth, right? Like people were keeping it secret. But two things happened that really opened the door on that. One is that a PC version of Max came out because prior to that, it had only been for Mac computers. Once the PC version came out, you really started to see people start using it a lot more and talk about using it. You saw big user communities start to form. And that was really great. And then the second thing is Max for Live came along, and that really opened the door to where people were sharing patches, creating forums, doing all kinds of stuff. So the user community is really quite big, and there's a lot of people, and they're often happy to share things. You can go on the cycling 74 website, and if you just go to the forums here, there's tons of information, and there's tons of patches here. Like if we look at something, here's somebody who's working on something, and there's probably a patch hidden in here. So here's a screenshot and I'm working on a patch. Let's try this one. Here it is. This person posted a patch. You can copy it, you can download it and sometimes they post it as just those text things that you can just copy and then open. Sometimes if there's a bunch of extra stuff, they just post a link and then you download it. So cycling 74 Forums. It's a great place to find all kinds of stuff. A really warm community of people willing to help. So if you are working on something and you're having a problem with it, post it here and say, I don't know why this doesn't work. And people will chime in, and they'll be really helpful. It's really great, actually. So that's a good one. But there's another one. There's another one that's kind of the cream of the crop, especially when it comes to Max for Live patches. So let's talk about that in a new video. 9. Maxforlive.com: Okay, this little unassuming site here is called is mafive.com. This site is huge. And it has tons of stuff on here. Insane amount of patches. Some of them are for sale, some of them are free. I'd probably say most of them are free, probably. But let's look for something. Let's say we want to do let's look for an audio device. And here's just tons and tons of audio devices, right? Like tape head. Here's a tape head kind of simulates running something through an old cassette. This is what the creator of it said, I wish I could carry my tape recorder on everywhere. I made this Max Fide device to help this. Cool. Here's device details. Here's more description and the download, right here. So we can go get it. Um, Once we go there, we may or may not have to pay for it, if we do have to pay for it, it's probably a couple bucks and it'll go right to this maker, I don't think Max for Live takes any money or anything, but there are just an insane amount of things here. Late C fixer FM two modulation. Next page. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Tools for everything you can imagine. If you just typed in, I want something that does Pads. I don't know. Here's 1 million things that come up, right? Like at that crazy huge thing. So, I mean, it goes on and on and on. So check out Mcfive that's like a number one resource for you to find all kinds of stuff. 10. "Famous" Max Patches: Okay. Next, I want to talk about a few famous Max patches. I want to put famous in quotes here because we're talking about kind of a small community. But this kind of goes back to that thing I was just talking about about people using Max in secrecy for a long time. Not so much anymore. I think people that use it now, especially in pop music are pretty proud that they use it because it shows a level of nerdiness that many bands can't get to But people were really secretive about patches, and that's especially true, we're going to look at the Otecer patch in a minute, which is impossible to use. But it's available. And the story is that it's available because somebody stole it off somebody else's hard drive or something like that. It's really strange. Um, The first one we'll look at is actually included within Max. It's just something that a lot of people have used and it has become very famous. The second one, the radio head patch. We don't actually even have the patch. We know what it sounds like, and we have some images of it from stage shots. And some people have made some kind of mockups and I'll show you one of those when we get there. But anyway, so these are kind of famous patches that people talk about all the time. And I just thought I'd show you how to track them down and make some sound with them to the extent that we can. Because when people make patches for themselves, they don't really document them. They don't say, click here to start the patch because they just know. So when you get your hands on one of these patches, sometimes you just have to figure it out and it can be hard. Okay, let's do it. Let's start with convolution workshop. 11. The Convolution Workshop Patch: Okay. Okay, so this first one, convolution workshop. This is one that introduces a lot of people to max how max works, and also what convolution is. So if you don't know what convolution is, it's basically a math process in which we take attributes of two things and make a new third thing. So it's like we can multiply two numbers together. You can also convolve two numbers together. Okay. So in the sound world, what that usually means is we can take two sounds, convolve them together and generate a new third sound. Okay. Usually that sound will have some elements of both. For example, it might use the rhythm of one sound and the tamber or pitch elements of the other sound. Now, doing this in real time is a relatively new thing. For a long time, we could do convolution with programs like sound hack and there's a few others. But it would do it in non real time. You had to set it up and then hit convolve and then it would think for a couple hours, then you'd come back and hear what you got. Okay. So this convolution workshop patch taught us that you can do it in real time in Max, which is wild. So let me show you this patch. First of all, how do we find it? Okay. If you have a full version of Max, you probably already have it. This is built into Max now. So in order to find it, I'm going to go to file, and then show file browser. That's going to open this thing, and then type in convolution to the search window, and then you'll find it. I have two versions of it. I have an old one and a new one. This is the new one that's open now. But you can also just search your hard drive, but this is faster for me. There we go, convolution workshop M Patch. Okay. And here it is. So how does this thing work? Let's look at the UI elements. So these little gray boxes will come to be a little familiar to you. This is like a media player box. So source is the sound file. We can change that with these dropdowns here, file in stick. Just try this first using the default files. So let's leave it as rainstick or we can drag a sound file here. That's cool. So we can start that playing. This volume right here. Okay, so this is cool. We're hearing a rainstick. Now we go over here. Here's the drum loop. Now there's a drum loop playing. We don't hear it yet. Let's not worry about the code stuff here, not to worry about any of that. But here, there's a little comment. It says, Experiment with adjusting the balance between the two sounds. So this is a slider I can click on. So here it says noise. I can go over here, and it's the drum loop. Noise, drum. Now, if I set this thing right in the middle, it's going to be the two sounds convolved together. So now it's using the rhythm. There we go. It's using the rhythm of the drum loop and the sounds of the rainstick. Turn it up a little bit. And this is our output volume. I'm going to stop this for a second. This little thing down here is an important thing that when you see it in a patch, basically it's not going to have the start audio comment on it. You might just see the si speaker icon. What that means is that you're not going to hear any sound until you click on it. Now sound is off for this whole patch, and sometimes your whole max version. We got to turn that on to start audio when you see that. This is convolution workshop. It's really neat. You can put some sounds in there and convolve them together. Okay. Let's do something crazy and just switch this to be my mic. Do Do do do do. It's working pretty well. It's the problem is that you're hearing it everything. Maybe it's recording better. Anyway, enough of that. Let's go on to the next one. 12. The Radiohead Patch: Up next, the radio head patch or more accurately the radio head patch is. Johnny Greenwood, the guitarist of Radiohead, and some would argue kind of one of the masterminds behind radio head is a big fan of Max. Particularly for running his guitar through it and getting glitch effects. That was the kind of most notable thing that he would do with it live anyway. This article, king of gear com has this cool article about it. Basically, you can hear it really well on the songs go to sleep, airbag, two plus two equals five, Ferrell and some others. Sometimes you samples the whole band. So we don't actually have the patch, but for these glitch effects, we can reconstruct it. Here is an early picture of one of the patches from Johnny Greenwood's rig. Here's another one from onstage. Obviously, we can't rebuild that just from that. Here's another one. This looks like that same one from above, same as the first one. So we can see you record. This is kind of a matrix module, lets you kind set inputs and outputs and make a little matrix of events. These look like sine waves, a bunch of different dials. It looks like a relatively simple drum machine patch. Something a little different LopatFull band looper patch. So now he's sampling a whole band in in real time. It's tricky. Yeah. So, we don't have access to any of these patches. No one's leaked them yet as far as I know. However, I found on the cycling 74 forum, someone saying, Well, the glitcher patch is kind of like this. So let's check that out. So I just copied it from the text. I'm going to go to Max file new clipboard. And this is what was made. So it looks like nothing, but it's all over here. I just need to make the window bigger. Okay. What have we got here? This person says, audio on and gain up equals on. Okay. So audio on is going to be here. First, we need to lock this patcher because it is open. That means if I click on something, I'm going to move it around. I don't want to do that. When that happens, hit this little lock icon down here. Now I'm actually using the patch. Audio on Okay. Cool. And that says, gain up. That's going to be down here. He says, gain. Turn it up. Bah This is my guitar solo. Okay. Okay. That's maddening. Let's turn that down. So basically what he's got here. It looks like he's got an E Q that's just randomly moving around. And then he's got something that's chopping up the sound that's coming in in real time. Then I've got a volume. He's also transposing it. Quite a bit. It looks like Three octaves. By this envelope speed, that doesn't sound like three octaves. So we're playing around with the pitch quite a bit. And glitching it out in some kind of stuttery way. That's annoying. It's cool, but it's annoying. Okay. So you can find this patch. If you go to 70 four.com forums Johnny Greenwood. You'll find it about halfway down the page right there. Cool. Okay. Let's look at my favorite of these most famous patches. Okay. 13. The Autechre Patch: Okay, the Ataker patch. Now, first of all, what's on ate? Ataker is a band, sort of a group of two producers really super influential. I don't want to say Avant Garde, but it's a little out there, a lot of their stuff. Their earlier stuff, not so much. But it kind of borders on the IDM. Maybe earlier stuff had a little bit more of a technov but it's definitely more abstract than your average pop producer. So they've been using Max for a really long time and supposedly they put out this patch. That is almost a complete album. I heard, although I can't find something that verifies this that what this patch does is basically generate music and they recorded a ton of it and then chopped it up, and that was an album. I don't know if that's true, but they definitely used a lot of it. So the story goes Patches were stolen on a USB drive. I heard that it was a computer tech. Like they hired a computer tech to come to the studio and fix some computer stuff. And when he was in there, he was like, Oh, and grabbed this patch. Whatever it was, it's out in the open now. It's been for a long time. This is not a new patch. This is quite old. Like even this post is 2008. So this was probably I don't know, it's really old. But let's check it out. So we're going to click on here to copy it. And then we're going to go to Max. New from clipboard. There we are. This thing is big and ugly and it's even bigger. Cool. This is hard because this tells us nothing. There's no information in here about how to use this thing. We hear this ph thump going and modulating it somewhere because it comes and goes a bit. We see two volume controls down here. That's that this is probably the other one. Yeah. Cool. We've got all kinds of buttons all over the place. We could try clicking those. We also have this. This is a UI element that's basically a bunch of different sliders. We could turn different things up. Cool. This is a pre set module. This means there's saved states of this patch built into here. Let's click on some of those. It doesn't appear to be anything here. More sliders we can play around with. Master volume. I got a lot happening now. Okay. It just goes on and on. And there's no way to well, there is a way to know what things are doing, but you'd have to unwind all this stuff. It would take forever. It would take years to really figure out everything that's happening here. So what I like about this patch is just clicking and exploring. Now, I'm going to mute this patch for a minute here. This patch does bring us up to an interesting thing that we haven't talked about yet. In the first patch we looked at the convolution workshop patch. I had to lock it in order to use it. That was this button way down here. Now, this one, if I lock it, nearly everything goes away. And what that means is that there's something called presentation mode, which means we can hide stuff when it's locked. So all the code is just kind of hidden, and this is the only stuff you really need to do things is what they're kind of telling you. But I want us to see all the other things in here, so I need to leave it unlocked. So if you want to interact with the patch, while it's unlocked, you just hold down the command key on a Mac or the similar key on a PC, and then you can move things around. So this is unlocked. So if I click on this, I'm just going to move this thing around. That's not what I want to do. I want to interact with it. I hold down command and then when I click on it, I'm actually interacting with it. Cool Now, this really goes crazy. Okay. So this is our tempo sort of Okay. Cool. Skin weird. Anyway, I could do this all day, literally all day. So what I want you to do if you want this patch, you can go to cycling 74 com slash Forum Ate Patch, or just search Google for Max Patch and you'll find it sure you spell Auteer correctly. It's a weird word. And also, check out the music of Ateker because it's awesome. 14. Max Files, Text Files, M4L Files, and Apps: Okay, so let's talk about the different types of files that we're going to deal with in Max. There are kind of a lot of them. But for starters, I want to deal with four. So first, your typical Max patch, right? Like, that means a file that we've made is going to be an MAX PAT Max patch file. So here's the thing I just made. I called it History of Max Max PT. So that means it's a Max patch. That means standalone Max. Those I don't think will open automatically in Max for Live. If you want to make a Max for Live file, you're going to make an AMX D file. It is slightly different. Now, because the environments are the same, if I wanted to turn this into an AM XD file, this, I could just select all copy, open Ableton, make a new Max patch, paste it in, and save it as an AMX D file. It would work just fine in this case. So AMXD is Max for live. Max Pat is Max. Now, there's also a weird thing with text files in Max. I think this comes from the community of Max users sharing things online. So if you search around for Max text file, you can find things like this. It always starts with begin Max PatcherMxPcher, it might be a version. Here's just a random one I found. This one looks really short, but I'm going to try it anyway. So what you do is select all of this copy. And then I'm going to go back to Max, and then I can go file new from clipboard. This is going to basically generate a max patch from that weird bit of text. Okay. And here's what that looks like. This is what that made neat, right? You could save text and open it. So you can open as text right here, open as text or you would point it to a text file, and those are just txt text file. Now, you don't want to do that. That's not an ideal way to do things. Okay. Unless you're like sharing it online or something like that. If you have a big Max file, those text things can get really long. And, you know, if one digit in it gets screwed up, the whole patch doesn't work. So it's really ideal for just sharing little things, but you can't open just text files with Max. Okay. Now, lastly, I want to talk about apps really quick. So let's go back to our history of Max. If I wanted to, I could go to file, and then here's Saves project, I believe, is just going to make a folder for this, and then save the file also. But here, I can build collective or application. So now I get this window that comes up there's a little bit more that has to go into this for us to complete it and make it work as an application. Actually, in this case, this probably will run just fine. So I can hit build. Now here where it says file types, I go to application. History of Mac app is what this is going to be called. I'm going to put it on my desktop. And then I make it. It's going to take a second, but there it is. So it worked. I can change the icon and sign this around and it's going to open just fine. Okay, so we'll talk more about how to make apps. I just wanted to introduce it because I think it's on a lot of people's minds. The main thing I want you to take away from this is Max Pat files. R four Max standalone AMX D Ableton. I think that stands for Ableton Max device. That's how I think about it. Cool. 15. Opening Max Patches: Okay, so in Live 12, if you go over to Max for Live here, and click on that. You're going to see a good number of patches. Now, if you don't see very much or if you want to see more. Go into PAC. And there are some Max for Live patches here, there's actually kind of a lot. It's hard to tell what's a Max for Live. Object. There was a few right there. MFL three building tools, granulator two, Plugos an old classic. So you can grab those right here. Let's grab big three. Let's click Install. That was real time. Very fast. All right, buffer shuffler loop, shifter, and step sequencer. Let's look at step sequencer. Open it. Now, here is the object, AMX D. Now, if I want to use it, I'm just going to drag it right onto a track or an open space. Now, here it is. Now, if that's all I want to do, then I'm done. I can just play with it, right? These are objects that these are patches that people have made and they're super useful and cool. So you should use them. You don't have to open up and reprogram everything. But if you want to. Here's what we do. We hit this little button right here. And then, and then Max is going to open. Now, it might take a minute for Max to open. And when it does open, you might see what looks like this window. You might see another window called the Max console. We'll talk more about that later. If you want to get into the gritty stuff, then you want to hit this button down here. And then you're in the code. Now, a lot of it's hidden. Any little object you see with a little p in front of it, you can double click on and open that up and get another patch that it's using. There's a lot more here than it immediately looks like. There's all these extra little patches. And some of those will have little patches inside of them. Here's one. There's another p inside this one. That opens this. So there's a lot of little things hidden in there. But that's basically just how we open a patch. If you just want to use it, don't worry about this, close it, and just drag a max patch onto something, and you can use it. Just a reminder, you've been using Max for Live patches for a long time. If we go into audio effects, see little icons here, these are Max for Live patches. There's a bunch of sprinkled all over a live 12 that you're already using LFO, everything in our modulators tab is a Max for patch. Okay. 16. Interacting With Max: Okay. The next thing to get comfortable with is just what you can interact with within Max. So when you're looking at a Max patch, what can you click on? What are the dials and things you can do? This can actually sometimes be quite hard to find. There's a lot of stuff that you're in a Max patch that you're not intended to interact with. There's just You know, it's math going on or whatever. But there are also a lot of things that you are supposed to interact with, and I've thrown a few of them on the screen here, just to give us an idea. Let's start with this. This is just a file from the tutorials that come with Max. But basically, these are number sliders. We can click and drag to slide them. Here's another one that's vertical. Here's one that's a dial. I can go up and down. Also, these are little number boxes. I can click and drag on those. This one's doing some math for me. Same thing with this. I can use a number to control these other things. That's a little bit more in the programmer end. But for now, just know that when you see sliders like this, you can play with them. All right. Also to our file here, I've added a couple of things. Here's a drop down menu that you might see. And then we have some real audio specific stuff, right? Like an ADSR envelope here. Here's another slider, another dial, I should say, a Mi keyboard, we can click on. And this may or may not generate MIDI notes. It depends on what it's connected to. But You may see these types of things. There's a whole bunch more. Just know that when you're looking at a max patch, there are a certain amount of things that we want to interact with. Now, these are called UI objects, user interface objects. We'll talk a lot about these once we get into programming max. But for now, just know that there are things you're supposed to play with. There are the dials, the buttons, all that stuff. But keep track of that term UI objects because we're going to be talking about it a lot as we move forward. 17. UI Examples: Okay. Let's look at another example of that. This is a patch by Tom osm called drone liquefier. This is a patch that he posted and I downloaded. I think I might have even bought it. Because it's really cool. It just turns anything into droney stuff. Anyway, I want to use it to show you UI elements. So there's a lot of them here. Now, this is the same thing we looked at a minute ago, so this is a Max for Live patch. I'm not really going to be able to do much with it right now. But I can still interact with it. So I have dials, that control things. I have numbers that I can click and drag on. I have buttons here that I can click on. More dials, more numbers, buttons, dials. The liquefy dial. Here's a volume control. So I can set the volume. I can control it this way. Here's a button. It says reset. I just click at once. It's a momentary button. There are more buttons, but these are not momentary. They're going to stay on. So let's give you just another idea of some of the user interface options that we have. 18. "Bangs" and Buttons: Okay, one of the most important and mysterious little elements of Max is something called a bang, okay? A bang is also sometimes called a button, but they are the same thing. They look like this. Okay? This is just a little floating circle, and basically I can click on it. Okay. That's all it does. That's all it does. You can think of these as a go button. We used to say do it button, but I think go is better. So I'm going to click on it, and it means go send a thing. So often you'll have big elaborate patches that do all kinds of stuff, but they don't do anything until you click that button. These are also used all over the place to convert one kind of thing to another kind of thing. Okay. We'll talk about that again later when we're in the programming side of things. What you need to know for now is just that when you see one of these, it might be that you're supposed to click on it, and it might be that it is being controlled by something else. So I want to now look at a couple examples of max patches and just kind of dig through the kind of big elements of them. We'll find the bangs, we'll find UI elements. Just kind of show you how to interact with a good max patch. 19. Example 1: Simple Synth Patch: Okay, so I have here a simple synthesizer patch. This is just something that I made really quick, as an example for another class. So I want to just look at the things that we can click on here. So here we see the text is saying Oscillator section and frequency. So that means we can click and drag on this. These types of boxes. We can click and drag. Or we can actually click and type in if we want. And then hit return. If it turns yellow, that means it's active and you can type or whatever. So clicking and dragging or typing after you hit it. I don't want to actually hear that frequency. So let's go I don't know, whatever. These things, they look like level meters because they are. There are a bunch of different level meters in max. So this is just one of them. This is the one that's designed to look like live. It's why it has a live game there. But we can adjust things. Now, this particular patch is set up to run a sine wave, which is what this is doing into this kind of ADSR envelope. And in order to trigger it, we need to hit this little button. So again, here is one of our bangs, right? So I'm going to click on it and that's going to trigger the sound. So I can click on it over and over, and that's neat. I think it's also set up so that I can play notes on a Mt keyboard. But I don't have one set up. I can adjust more things here. This is actually the note, so you can see this is updating that. This is going to let me play in a MIDI note. Here we have a little breakpoint editor. This is familiar if you've ever used an ADSR kind of envelope. This one's a little bit different because I've added a couple extra little spots to it, but this is the types of things you can do with Max. If you're saying I want an ADSR envelope that has like a weirder shape to it. You can add points all over the place if you want. And make your ADSR envelope, do that. Sure. It's going to sound like that. Let's kill it. And I have a little E Q here. So this is a UI object. I can move it around. I can change the modes to do different things if I want. So I can click and drag on this. So this is another UI object that you'll see in audio devices sometimes if they want it. Okay, these boxes are again, the objects, the little programs running things. So Okay, so a cool little, you know, very simple synthesizer to play with. Should I give you this patch? Do you want this patch? Sure, I guess. I'll give you this patch. Why not? 20. How To Open These Files: Just a very quick little reminder. Here's how you open these. I'm about to give you some max patches, Max for Live patches, and here's what you do. So all you have to do to open these is take the file I'm about to give you. It's probably going to download as a ZIP file. So you're going to have to double click on it, open that, and you're going to get to what looks like a file called AMX D. So this particular one is called 15 simple synth AMX D. Then this one is a max instrument. So you just need to drop it on a midi track. Okay. And that's going to open. It's going to look like this. You're not going to see the whole thing. If you want to see the whole thing, click the Max button there, and it'll open it in a new window. The same is true of all the AMXD files. Drop them on an audio or midi track depending on what kind of file they are. You won't really know just by the name of it, so you can try just on both and drop it where it works. These first two 15 simple synth, that's an instrument. Put it on a met track. The second one that I'm going to give you is called 17 Mi madness, and that is going to be a met effect. So put it on a M track. That's it. And I'll just add the numbers that I named the files are going to be different. So I think it's actually going to be 16 symbol synth and 18 minty madness. Don't worry about those numbers. That's how I keep track of files while I'm making stuff. If the numbers are different, it doesn't matter. Still the same patch. 21. Example 2: MIDI Madness Patch: Okay, here's another little patch. Now, again, in these, all I really want us to do is get used to looking at patches. Okay? We're going to dive into more in a minute. But the idea here is getting comfortable with what we can click on and just kind of looking around and dealing with Max a little bit. So this is another one I made for something a while ago. This just shows you a whole bunch of midi information happening on your system. So here, if you want to see everything, what this is going to do is listen for all the medi information that's happening on your computer, and then it says print. And what print does is it sends it to the Max console, which is over here, which is this kind of weird window that's sitting here not doing anything at the moment. So if I start playing notes on a midi keyboard, which I've now set up, you're going to see all kinds of stuff happening over here. Okay, so here's me playing some notes. It just is like numbers flying by, right? Like way too much information to process. But maybe that's useful to you, maybe not. Here, I've separated it out. So if I say, show me only notes. So I'm going to look at the pitch, the velocity, and the Mi channel. So if we look here, I'm playing note number 55, here's the velocity. I'm playing it. I'm playing it over and over right now. And then it's on My Channel five. Control messages, those are like faders and sliders and knobs and things. So I have some on this keyboard. I don't think they're coming in as control messages because I'm on a strange keyboard. Okay. But this will show me any kind of control information coming in. I've also put some output stuff here. So this is a Miboard. I think we saw this once already, but I can click on it. And this is set up to a little mit synthesizer just to play kind of a default little general mit click or slide around and do crazy stuff. I can output control messages. I don't have anything I can output them to right now, but I would slide this around and this would generate some control messages. Okay. One thing that I want to point out about this patch is that there are some objects, the little programs that you can click on and specifically double click on. Sometimes you'll see something like note out. And you can double click on that, and it's going to give you some options. These options are telling us, where do you want me to send that note? Okay. So like My in. I can double click on that and I'll say, what am I listening to. And in this case, it's going to listen to my seaboard rise number two. And note in, what am I listening to? Control in. What am I listening to and control out? Where am I sending this? So I'm just double clicking on these devices. Now, that's not always true, like this make note object. If I double click on it, it doesn't do anything. So there are some objects that have some extra settings. So you'll double click on those to get access to those settings. It says, mostly true for anything that is connecting to things outside of your computer, like Mi devices. Audio devices sometimes work this way too, where there's double clicking on them, we'll say, you know, listen to Channel one on my interface or output two, Channel three on my interface or whatever you want. Okay. So when in doubt, don't be scared to double click on an object just to see if there are any settings there. I suppose now I'm in the habit of giving you these little patches. I'll give you this one, too. Maybe this is interesting. Maybe not. I don't know. But I'll put it in the next little bit. Okay. 22. Locking and Unlocking: Okay, I'm going to just put a slider on the screen. I'll explain these sliders in a minute, but I just want to demonstrate one thing. As we start to learn how to build stuff in Max, there are three important things I need you to know. Two of them surround how to get help and find answers. One of them is about the kind of how to interact with the Max patching window, which is what we're in here. Okay? So these patching windows can have three states, and then a few more. Okay? Right now, this is unlocked, which means I can move things around. Okay? If I go to this bottom little corner thing, little padlock, that's going to lock it. Now, if I try to click on this, I'm going to actually use it and interact with it. So if I want to interact with something, I need it to be locked. If it's unlocked and I try to use it, I'm just going to move it around, right? So locked and unlocked. Now, you can toggle between those two by clicking down here. You can also command click on Mac. I'm not sure what it is on a PC, but modifier key, and then click any dead space. This is going to toggle you on and off. You can also. There's a third thing you can do. If you are unlocked and you want to interact with this, you can hold command and then click on it and interact with it. But locked and unlocked are our main two things. Then there's also something called presentation mode over here. That's a special way of interacting with live where we basically can hide everything we don't want and just make it look really pretty. We'll do that at the very end. But this is where that comes from. This is why if you open up another patch that's already done and looks really cool and you want to interact with it. Usually, you need to click on this presentation mode to get it out of presentation mode so that you can interact with it. Then there's a third thing called freeze where we can basically lock it down and make it so we can't do anything with it except interact with it. That'll often be on while for patches you've downloaded and are trying to use also. The main thing we're going to interact with in this class is locked and unlocked. You'll see me toggle between locked and unlocked a whole bunch as I'm trying to explain how things work. Remember what I'm always doing is command, click somewhere that's not an object. That's how we get in and out of locked and unlocked mode. Okay. 23. Mouse Over Help: Okay, two quick little videos on getting help. The first is mouse Over help. Now, here's what that means. All over the place in live on objects, on UI objects, on messages, on everything. You're going to find inlets and outlets, y? These are these little gray circles right here. Inlets and outlets. I'll show you this in just a second. But if I go to an object like Uzi, for example. It's got a bunch of inlets at the top. It's got two inlets at the top and three on the bottom. And in order to use any object, you need to know how those work. What comes out of them, and it's different for every object? How do you not go mad? Well. Put your mouse over it, and then just wait a second. I'll tell you this one it says watch out because this is kind of a joke. This one says De banging bang. De paging pan. Okay. Again, this was kind of funny. I should have picked a more serious object. But basically, what that's saying is that something's going to happen in this outlet when it's all done. This one is going to say the current index, like where it is. This one to one says start shooting bangs. So we're going to send that something to say start shooting bangs. And this one, it says, how many banks to shoot. Now, if you couldn't figure out what Uzi does from those five things, what it does is it shoots out a whole bunch of banks, like a lot. But let's get rid of that for the moment. Let's look up here. Displays valued outputs value when slider is changed. Good. That's important to know. So whenever you're faced with an object of any kind and you don't know how to use it, put your mouse over the inlets and outlets and look at what it's telling you there. Sometimes that's all the information you need. But if that's not all the information you need and you want more help on how to use it, then we have help files. Let's learn about those. Okay. 24. Help Files: Okay, so we've got the slider here. How do we use this slider? We can figure out what our inputs and outputs do. But let's say we need a little bit more help. Like, let's go over to our output, and it says, outputs value when slider is changed, and you're like, what does that mean? What can I do with this? Well, let's find out. So control click or right click to get this contextual menu. And then right at the top, open slider help. This is going to This works for most objects. This is going to open a file that is a help file and shows you exactly how to use this thing. This shows us some things that we can do. Here's different layouts for it. It can be vertical, it can be horizontal, it can be a floating point number. There's some tabs up here to show you different things. You can change its color. You can do all kinds of fun stuff. So this will walk you through exactly what you need to know to use this thing. If you go to the right side, it says, these are messages that you can send it. These are attributes, which we'll talk about later, and then see also other things that are similar to this, right? Now, you may have noticed that these help files are full functioning max patches, right? So you can copy out of them, like, I'm going to unlock it, and then say, Okay, this is what I'm trying to do. So I'm just going to command C, copy that, go back to my project, and paste that in, right? So we do this all the time. Even I do this, copy stuff out of help files all the time. It's totally okay. That's why they're there. So in order to get into a help file, control click open help, and now we have the help file in this case, for a number box, and it tells us everything those things can do. So as you start getting into learning more and more objects, you should be opening those help files like at least once for every object that you encounter. I mean, I do it. When I'm making a project, I'm constantly opening help files and saying, Wait, how do I use this thing again and looking for it. Another thing I do is, I might say, I don't know what the best object is for this particular problem I'm facing, but I know one that's close, so open that, go to that right side, scroll down till it says C also, and it's going to give me a bunch of objects that are similar, but might be the actual thing I need. So those help files are awesome. Okay. Okay. Now that we've figured that out. Let's go through this row of stuff at the top and just figure out some of the basic tools that we have in this top palette. Okay. 25. Objects: Okay, so the next few things we're going to do are we're going to open up something new in Live 12. We're going to go through the main tools. Now, there's like a tool palette like we have in like a graphics program. You've already seen that a little bit, but we're going to go through each thing in that palette. Then we're going to talk about how to do something very simple, like adding numbers. And then we're going to start building stuff, okay? So stick with me for two big sections while we learn some basic principles, and then we're going to start building something fun, okay? So let's go over those first few things in our tool palette. So I'm going to go to Max for Live. I'm going to go to the top. For what we're going to do here, it's not really going to matter whether we choose audio effect, instrument or medi effect. I'll do medi effect. But the tools are all the same. Okay. Now I'm going to click this little button to open her up. Now, Max for Live is loading. All right. And here we are. So I'm going to drag this to be nice and big. I'm going to get rid of these comments. They're cool. They don't need them. And then I always just out of habit, drag this to the bottom and disconnect that. I'm going to click on that line, just press delete. I don't really need to do it for what we're about to do. So here is my kind of main tool palette, okay? We've got tools all the way around the side, but we're going to focus on these ones at the top. And we're going to start with an object. So I'm just going to click and drag one down there. I can also just double click on it or single click on it to make an object. Okay. Now, I'm going to put a message box here, too, just because I want you to be able to spot the difference, okay? This is an object. This is a message. It's important to be able to see the difference. Object has a thicker border on the top and the bottom. And messages don't really have any border, right? They have inlets and outlets. And objects have inlets and outlets, too, but they don't need to, and the number of inlets and outlets they have are going to change. So what do objects do? Objects are our main workhorse. Each object is a little program. If you want to go back to the guitar effects pedals that I was talking about with stomp boxes. Each one of these is a stomp box. So I could say something like delay. Okay? Now we have a little program that delays things. I could do random. Let's say I want something that generates random numbers. I can choose an object called random. That's great. Now, there's probably around, I don't know, a couple thousand objects. There's a lot and a lot of using Max is understanding what object to use for what situation. So we'll get more into that shortly. Okay. Now each object has inlets and outlets. The inlets are at the top, the outlets are at the bottom. You can click and drag to make a connection to something, that's not going to make a whole lot of sense. I just did there. I can click on the patch, which is the cable, the line, and press delete to delete it. Now, the number of inlets and outlets will change depending on what object you're using. In the random object, there are two inlets and one outlet. But if I did an object like If I did an object like select, we have to make it a little bit bigger. We have two inlets and two outlets. So it's slightly different. I can make a more complicated object like this, and now we have a bunch of inlets and a bunch of outlets. These are all going to change for each object that we use. But don't worry. I'm going to show you how to get comfortable with these things. Next, let's talk about messages. That is these. 26. Messages: Okay, if we think of objects like little programs, messages are kind of the opposite. Messages don't do anything. They're like little carrier pigeons. They just hold onto information and send information. So, I could say, Pickle. I could write pickle into this message box, and it's going to be perfectly happy. Now, how is that useful? Well, different objects want different messages, and there's a couple of different ways to get a message into an object. But one of them would be to do something like this. We could say pickle into select. Now, the particular select object or you could think of it as the select program doesn't know what to do with the word pickle. So if I click on the word pickle, it's going to send it down this line and into select, okay? And there we go. We just did it. So now, select got pickle and select is like, I don't know what to do with pickle. So nothing happened. But we can put numbers in message boxes. We can put words, we can put a series of words. You can do a lot of different stuff. Okay. Messages will be sent down their output, that'll be sent out when one of two things happens. One, we can just click on them. That will send them down. Or another way to put that would be to output, that'll output their contents, whatever their message is when we click on it. We can also hit them with a bang or a button. If we do that, now whenever I click this bang, it's going to hit that message and send it to that object, Let's do this, just to prove it. Let's use an object called print. Let's get rid of that and put this down into there. Now, what print is going to do, that is an object that is going to send anything to the Max console. Okay? This is the Max console. Okay. So if I hit this bang, it says, The Max console says print zero. The Max console is a great way just to see what's going on. You also get errors here sometimes. So if something's not working, you want to look at the Max console and see what it's doing or what it's not doing. So I can click on the zero and it goes to the print or I could hit this bang and it goes to the print. Okay? So messages can be anything. I could say Hello. Peanut butter. Okay. If I click on it, it says, Hello peanut butter. If I hit it with a bang, it says, Hello peanut butter. Messages are not programs. They're just little carrier pigeons. Okay. 27. Comments: All right, up next is a comment. Now, a comment. A comment doesn't do anything at all. It's not a carrier pigeon. It's not an object. It's just a little note to your future self. So if I say Click here to send message. I might type that and then I might leave it right there. A comment is a way to just note in your patch what's happening and why it's happening. We leave these all over the place just to help us remember what's doing what. We also sometimes use them for design purposes. You can make them look pretty and make a heading. It's just a block of text somewhere, but it doesn't have any function. In the program other than to just give us a reminder of what's happening. It's like a footnote for how we built it. They're especially useful when you're collaborating with another person. You might say, This chunk of stuff is for the audio system, whatever. So you just leave a little note that says, Hey, this is how this works, and this is how this works. You'll be glad for this functionality someday, I promise. 28. Toggle: Okay, up next is this toggle. Okay? Now, this is cool. This we often use these to turn things on. If we click on them, you know, it's toggle. But let's look at what a toggle is actually saying. Let's connect it to a print here. Okay. If we look over here, when I turn it on, toggle says one, and when I turn it off, it says zero. So we like to put toggles on things just to give us an on off switch and things like that. But all it does is send ones and zeros. So you can think of it as a fancy way of sending a one and a zero. But often we set things up so that they turn on when they get a one and they turn off when they get a zero. Okay. So that's all a Toggle does. So it just outputs a one or a zero. You might say, why does it have an input? If we can just click on it to turn it on or off? Well, we could send it a message of a one. To turn it on, if we need to, and in that way, we could send it a bang. So we could bang a one to turn it on, we turn it off first. So in this case, when I hit this bang, we're going to send hello peanut butter to the Max window. We're also going to send a one to this toggle and to the Max window. So the max window should show hello peanut butter and one. One hello peanut butter. One got there first. Generally, in Max, things on the right side of the screen get there first. It's a weird max thing. 29. Buttons And Bangs: Okay, we've already talked about bangs and buttons, but those are our next thing here. What I will add. So if I grab one, let me just kind of show you just one kind of funny thing. So if I make a pyramid of buttons, I can connect them all. I could do that. I could even do that. Now, in this case, bangs can hit bangs all day long. These are all going to go off. Now, if we were counting, let me do this. Let's do I'm going to make an object called counter. It's going to count how many bangs it gets. Okay. We'll put a number box at the end of it so we could see how many it gets. Let's put that down there. We'll scroll down a little bit. Okay. So if I just click this top one, what number is going to come up here? This just counts bangs. Here's this bang is going to hit these two, so that's two. But it's not counting these two, it's only going to count these last three. So This one is going to hit this one. So that's one that it's going to get. This one is going to hit this one, that's two. This one is also going to hit this one, that's three, and then this one is going to hit this one, that's four. The number four should come up here if we do it right. Three. Okay, so it only came up with three. Now, do you think you might know why? I'm going to tell you, but I'm going to go to the next video first to tell you because this has to do with number boxes. And Okay. So let's go to a new video about number boxes and explore this issue. Okay. 30. Number Boxes: Okay, the number box. There are a few different kinds of number boxes, and I want to talk about two. What the number box does is it just shows you a number. It's kind of like a message box in that it can hold onto a number, and then we can get that number from the number box later. Or it can just output a number. We can also click on number boxes so that this turns in this yellow color, and then we can type in numbers, hit return, or we can click and drag to get numbers. Like that. We can input numbers into them, whatever we want. Important to note that this is not a counter. This will not count numbers. This is a counter. But if I put a bang into this, It's not going to do anything because it doesn't know what to do with a bang. I could put a message box with the number into it, and then it'll switch to that number. That's how number boxes work. But back to this problem, what was going on here? Why did this count three? Because the counter object, like many things, starts counting at zero. So it's first digit that output when it got its first bang was zero, zero is a number in max. Okay. So that sent that to the number box, and the number box said zero. And then it sent a one, two, actually, it sent zero, one, two, three. That's how counter works. So this is I guess really a number box problem, so much as a counter problem. Okay, but like I said a minute ago, there are two different kinds of number boxes. This is called a number box. There's another one called a flow num, which if you hold your mouse down on this, just a little bit, you can get this. This is a signal. We're going to use that for audio stuff. But just for numbers, this is a flow num, which basically means floating point number, which is a fancy way to say a number with a decimal point in it, okay? I could go into a long explanation of this, but here's what you really need to know. These number boxes cannot deal with a number with a decimal point in them, okay? These are going to throw out the decimal point, only whole numbers in this. These can deal with whole numbers and numbers with decimal points. So if you're wondering, if you think whatever you're doing might have a decimal point in it, use this, okay? It used to be in the old days that these required a little bit more computing power than these, because they had to hold on to some extra information. That's still true, but we have plenty of computing power, so you could use these for most things if you wanted to. But I would still recommend only use them when you need to, I suppose. Okay. Onto the next thing. 31. Sliders: Okay, up next sliders. Now, if you click and hold down here, you'll see there's a bunch of different types of sliders. Let's look at the most basic one first. This is exactly what it says, right? It's a slider. It gives us a value based on what it is, what we're doing with it. This is a UI object. We've looked at this already. We've looked at similar things like this already. We could put a number box at the end of it. To see what it's doing and to see what its range is. Zero to 1207, what I expected. We're going to find 1207 to be all over the place because that's the range of midi values. We'll talk more about that later. Other sliders would be like this dial, which we can set to be whatever we want. That's good for volume and panning. We've got this. This is a gain slider. This is specifically designed to be used for volume as a way to scale volume. Is range is going to be basically zero to one. Here's a funny looking slider. This is a piano keyboard. We can use it to send midi values for whatever we want. There's a lot of different sliders. They all basically send a string of numbers and give us different visual ways to see it. 32. MaxForLive Objects: All right. Two more quick things on this. This next one here is Max for Live objects. Now, these objects, these are called Max for live objects, but you can use them for anything you want. You could be in the full version of Max and use Max for live objects. It doesn't really matter. The reason that these are called Max for Live objects is because they look like live. That's really the only reason So here's another dial, right? This is called a live dial. We could use either one of these for like a volume dial if we wanted to. It's just that this one looks like live, right? So it's a live object. Let's go back there. We've got text boxes, tabs, arrows, buttons, another slider, more things. Here's audio stuff, audio signal. Here's the main Ableton slider. That looks like, live. Some widgets. I'm not even sure what these are. Live grid. So you can make a little step sequencer with this. It's ugly. You can play around with those. They work the same as everything else. They just look more live like. Okay. 33. Everything Else: Okay. There's more. There's more than just what we've looked at up here. Here's the everything else button. Here's a bunch of stuff that we haven't looked at. But all of these are really more objects. Most of these UI things are objects too. Like, see this live dial. Watch this. I'm going to go to object. I'll move it down here. Okay. Now I'm going to make an object called Live diive dial. When I hit return, Poof turns into live dial. So really, all of these UI objects are objects. So there are bajillion objects. And if you start typing, you can start to see all these different objects come up. These are just the ones that have an A in them. But don't worry. We're going to get comfortable trying to find the objects that we need and you know about help files and things that will help you steer you in the right direction. Just know that there's more than just these few things up here. There's also this kind of everything else button, and also there's 1 million objects. So this is just kind of your most used stuff. Okay. 34. [+]: All right. Let's make something. So we're going to start with our very first object, and it's an object that you've already seen. Here we go. Plus. That is our very first object. So we can see from the new object list here, what plus does. It adds two numbers and outputs the result. So I'm going to hit return to make that object. Now, you might be thinking, I know how to add two numbers. I don't need Max to do that for me. Dory. We're going to start with something very simple, and we're going to get to something very complicated, very fast. So just stick with me for just a second here. Okay, I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Okay, so we have two inlets and two outlets. We're going to try to understand how this object works because it presents a few oddities that you'll see kind of all over Max. Okay. So let's look at its inputs. Plus set left operand trigger the calculation. So here's what that means. That means in this left inlet, we can set the left operand, so that would be like two plus two let's do two different numbers, two plus three. So the two is the one on the left. So it's saying, set the left operand. It's the first one. Meaning that also, it can trigger the calculation. So if you send something into the left inlet here, it's going to trigger it to actually do the math, versus the right just sets right operand. Okay? So let's put in a message box. Because remember message boxes, hold messages. The little carrier pigeons. Let's say two. Let's make another message box, and let's say three. Okay? So if I put this one in, oh, let's put a number box at the bottom so we can see it's output. That's going to show us the answer. So if I put this three, now I click on this three, nothing happens, right? Because it didn't trigger the calculation and it doesn't know what to add three two anyway. So it's just going to say, three, thanks. I don't know what you want. If I put this two here. Now, if I click on this two, it's going to say, Okay, two plus it already knows three because we already gave it three. It's just waiting for the left operand or to trigger the calculation. So if I say two, we get five to output. Again, I can go here and I can say, put a new number here. Nothing happens because I haven't output this number yet. I have to click on it for it to go down here and into the plus, and even after I do that, nothing's going to happen because the right inlet doesn't trigger the calculation. The left one does. If I click two again, now we're going to get two plus six. Okay. Makes sense. So things don't automatically go down the patch cable. We have to click on them or send them bang or something. Even when they do, they don't automatically process by the object, all the time. Sometimes they do. Okay. So what if I wanted to be able to change on the fly, what these two things are? Let's replace these with a number box and see if we can make this a little bit more dynamic. 35. Changing Message Boxes: Okay. Okay, let's get rid of these two messages, and let's put number boxes there. Number box number box. I'm just going to say the output. Into there. Now, the same is true. If I go here, I can slide this up to 19. Sure. Now here, what's going to happen here is whenever I give a number box a new number, it's going to output. So no matter what I do here, it's going to output. And because it's in the left inlet of the plus, it's going to trigger the calculation. If I just start scrolling this, you're going to see whatever I'm at plus 19 appearing down here. There's all kinds of numbers just coming up. Yes, we can do negative numbers. That's just fine. Okay. Okay. Now, I can also do another thing with number boxes here, which is I can bang them. Let's say I put a bang on this number box. What that means is that when I click this, it's going to hit 44 and trigger the calculation. Now, we're not seeing anything happen because what I'm triggering is 44 plus 19, which is 63, which is what that already says. It's not going to show us anything different, I could do this though, change this to a new number. Now if I bang this, it's going to trigger a calculation of 1601 plus 44. That gives us 205. We could bang number boxes to get them to output. Two more things on this, and then I promise we'll make some music with it. 36. Other Math Operators: Okay, so we're getting comfortable with the plus object. All math operations can be done in more or less the same way. So let's look at, let's actually leave that alone. I'm going to copy, paste. Move this over here, and switch our plus to minus. Okay. Let's make sure it still works the same. Sets the left operand, trigger the calculation, sets the right operand. We can say in our right one, ten and our left one, five, and now we're going to do five minus ten, and the result is going to be negative five. Awesome. So that works the same. Let's look at multiply, which we use an asterix for multiply. Okay. Did anything change in our inlets and outlets? No, pretty much the same. Let's say 26. Neat. Divide, we just use a slash, divide two numbers. Now, I don't need to retrigger 20. I could just pull something on this. And now we see the result of 54/20. Now, why do we see 54? Because when I changed the object to a new object? I forgot about the number and it's write in laight. That's always going to happen. So I need to give it something new here. So let's say five, and I press return. And now if I change this, it gives me an answer. 45/5 is nine. Let's do 46/5 is nine. No, it's not. Why is that wrong? Floating point numbers. Decimals. This number box can't show a decimal. Let's go back to our number boxes up here and get a floating point number. And let's connect that right there. That's going to be zero until I trigger this again. Now, it's still not showing me the floating point number because the division object that I'm using here. What I'm saying is divide whole numbers is what this object wants to do. If I wanted to divide in a way where we get the result with a floating point number in it, I need to give it an argument. That is a floating point number. Now that's going to work. So what are arguments. Let's learn arguments in our next video. 37. Arguments: Okay, let's go back to our plus. What if what we wanted to do here actually was always add 1601 to something. We're only going to change the left inlet. So we're always going to say plus 161 to any number that comes in. If that's true, we can We can put 1601 as an argument. And what that means is, I'm going to get rid of it here and I'm going to go into the object. I'm going to put a space after the name of the object. There has to be a space there. U type 1601. Now, 1601 is what's called an argument. You can think of it as a default state for the object. So what this object says is plus, that is the object, 161, always. So now I don't need to give it anything in the right inlet. I still. I can if I want to, and it'll overwrite my argument. But if I don't, it's always going to be 44, it's always going to be whatever this is plus 1601. Okay? I no longer need my right inlet because I've just kind of hard written my right inlet into the object as an argument. Okay. So let's not do 1601. Let's say 12 ops plus space 12. Now, this brings up an interesting point about arguments about objects, and that is that it is true that no object can have a space in its name. Okay? All objects are single things. They don't have a space in their name because after the name of the object, there's a space and then arguments. Some objects can have a whole bunch of arguments. Sometimes you see name of the object, space, two or three different things. Here's an example that I used earlier, I think, select zero, one, two, three, four, I can go on and on and on. What we have here is a program called select an object. And the arguments I gave it was one and another argument of two and another argument of three, and another argument of four. So how many arguments an object can take is unique to every object. What the arguments are is unique to every object. So how do you know? How do you figure out what arguments you can give to any object? Help files. Always. Look at the help files and it'll tell you what arguments it can take. Okay. Okay, so let's go back to this. Let's say nine plus 12 is 21. Now let's do some other stuff. Let's say, Let's take this number plus seven. So we'll take the output of that and add seven to it. Now you can just kind of like cascade math. Okay? So this is going to trigger automatically, right? Because when this gets a new number, it's going to automatically trigger this plus seven, and then we're going to get down here. So when I hit this bang, we're going to get nine plus 12 21 plus seven result here, 28, right? If I change this number to 25. Now we get the cascade of stuff. While changing this number is going to trigger the thing to work. All right. Let's add one more. Let's do plus two. And you might be thinking, Hey, why am I doing this? Why am I adding all these numbers together? Because I want us to make some music with this, and let's do that in the very next video. Here we go. 38. How is this useful?: Okay. Why do I care about adding numbers? I just want to make music. Let's do this. Watch. Okay. Let's go to no doubt. We're going to turn all of these numbers into midi notes. This is an object called node. Let's see what it needs. First, it needs pitch. Next, it needs velocity, and next, it needs midi channel. We need those things to all show up at the same time more or less. Let's use a message box for velocity. Let's just not worry about velocity right now and just say velocity is going to be 100. I'm going to put that in there, and then channel is going to be one. Then I'm going to make my all of these. Let's say 304249 and 51. Oops, I didn't connect that. Okay, what's going to happen now? I'm going to change this number. It's going to change all of these numbers, and they're all going to shoot out to the node. It's not going to do anything until it knows about our velocity and our midi channel. Now, I believe we could just send these and then send all of this. Let's try it. Okay. Now I'm going to send all of these, but we're not going to hear anything still. Because we don't have an instrument. So let's go back to live for a minute. We're on this Midi channel. We're about to make a whole bunch of weird midi notes, but we need an instrument. So let's do operator just like a default operator. Just keep things simple. Okay. Now, let's go back here. You hear that? So we're hearing, like, a weird little chord. Because we're getting all of these notes, right? So this is why it matters. Midi is just throwing numbers around, right? So What we can do with all of these numbers is make some crazy met sequence. Now, if we add some delays to some of these numbers, suddenly, we're going to have in our pegiator because we're going to tell each number to go one at a time. Let's make. Let's make that as our first big max for live patch. We're going to make a little met sequence using numbers and delays. Here we go. Okay. 39. Making MIDI Notes: All right. So we're going to make a new midi sequence kind of thing. Now, I do this project or assignment or whatever you want to call it a lot in my real world classes. And the danger of this is that I get two into it and just start goofing around with this for hours at a time. So I'm going to try not to do that. We'll see what happens. Okay, so I'm going to start from scratch. So let's take a max midi effect, throw it on a track. There it is. Let's open it up. There it is. Now I'm going to make this window nice and big. And this midi in and midi out stuff I don't really need because we're going to make notes in a slightly different way than midi out. So we can leave that there. Maybe I'll break this just to make sure there's no confusion. These are just comments. We know what those are now, so we can get rid of it. You might be wondering about this vertical line here. What you're seeing here is once you make something and you want to make it look really nice, you can do that, and then anything you put above this line is what's going to show up here in Ableton, anything below this line is for things that you don't need someone to see. There are other ways to hide things, but that's one way we do it. Okay. So let's do this. Let's make this a little more fun. Let's take a note. Let's take a midi note and turn it into something crazy. Okay? So first, we need an object that's going to listen for Midi coming in to this track. That is going to be node in. Specifically, Node in is going to listen for notes. Not anything else. This MIDI in will look for everything. This node in is going to look for just notes. Let's make that a bit. Let's look at our outputs. Pitch. Velocity and mini channel. Let's put a number box on each of those just so we can see what's coming in. If you're wondering how I duplicate things like that, I'm an option click and drag is what will leave one in place and then take a new one with it. Let's place some minty notes. I don't see anything because I haven't saved this yet. Sometimes in order to get these Max for Live effects to work, you need to at least save it once. Let's call this online class mid sequence. Okay. I'm not getting any notes right now because I need this track to be armed so that Mi notes come into that track. Now Mi notes are coming into that track and they're going into my Max patch. Let's go back over to Max. Now we see the note number and the velocity, how hard I'm playing it, and the channel. Okay, so you'll notice that we're not going to hear anything. And in this case, we're not going to hear anything for two reasons. One is that we haven't put an instrument on our track yet. So let's just put a piano of some sort on here. Oh, here's a road. Let's put a roads on it. All right. Next, we're still not going to hear anything because note in is coming in and then doing nothing with those numbers. So we need a note out. Okay? Now, if we want to hear these things, we can just route them straight down. And now we're going to hear the notes we play. Okay. Cool. So in this case, all three of these numbers are getting here at the same time more or less. We saw earlier how I don't really have to do that. These two could just hang out, and I could change the number the note number once we get any number in these left two inlets. That's how this particular object works. Okay, next, let's make a little delay for our note. Okay. 40. Delaying Notes: Okay. So we need an object that's going to delay something. So let's make a new object. Let's put it over here. And now let's just take a guess. We need something that's going to delay something, so let's try delay. Now, look at all the things that come up. These are different types of delays. These are different types of delays. Delay by itself is going to delay a bang. We don't need to delay a bang here. We need to delay a number or possibly a series of numbers. Delay Tilda is going to delay a signal. Signal, in this case, means an audio signal. That's not what we want either. Delay, not really sure what that is. Pipe delay numbers, lists, or symbols. That sounds like what we want. We want delay numbers. Okay? So it's called pipe. Why is it called pipe? Sometimes the makers of Max do funny things for their object names. There are so many objects that I think they just get bored. Like there's a drunk object. There's a There's a couple other silly ones. But pipe is not necessarily silly. If you think about it, what we're doing with pipe is we're taking a stream of numbers or letters or anything. Putting it through a pipe, and then we're basically going to squeeze the pipe down and create a bottleneck to slow it down. So it kind of makes sense. So I'm going to double click on that and make pipe. Okay? How do we use pipe? Let's find out. We're going to go to that help file. So let's see. We've got three arguments here. We probably don't need all three. Delay numbers, symbols, pipe uses the max time format, syntax. Delay interval can be either fixed or tempo relative. That means fixed means we're going to give it a number of milliseconds. Tempo relative means we're going to give it a number of beats or 16th notes or whatever we want to do. Okay, so what are these arguments? So here it says arguments, initialization list optional. So that means we can give it something to delay. We can give it the value of the delay, and we can give it a time in milliseconds. Now, if we don't use all of these, we can just use some of them, but they have to be in the right order. So what I'm going to use here is just the amount of time. And you can do that in pipe. So let's say 1,000. That means 1,000 milliseconds, that's going to be 1 second. Now let's look at my inputs. In the left inlet is the thing to be delayed, right inlet delay time. We could give it a new time here and it would overwrite the argument. Maybe we'll do that later. Then this is the output. I'm going to take this note and run it through pipe Okay. Now, I'm going to play a note and you're going to hear it 1 second later. Okay. There it is. Okay. Now, in this case, what's happening is that we're we're getting a velocity zero before the delay happens. So I need this velocity to be off at this point. So what I could do for velocity is just say the velocity is going to be 100. And now I need to make sure I hit that velocity at the same time or before this comes. So let's put a bang. And do that. Because remember, bangs are just going to throw out whatever you give it and say bang. So this is going to get a number. It's going to get the note number, but the bang is going to say, I don't know what that number is. I'm going to say bang. It's going to hit this 100, and then we're going to get a velocity. There it is. Okay? So I can play some notes. Now they are a second later. Cool. It works. Okay. Now, what if we want to hear our undelayed note at the same time. Let's add that in. Okay. 41. Adding a Toggle: Okay. What if we wanted the dry to come through, the dry, meaning the not delayed, right? We can do that. All we would have to do is this. Now, let me try to clean this up a little bit. Now, let's see what's happening. First, we're going to play a note, and this is going to take it right down to the note out and we're going to hear it. But then also that note is going to go over to the pipe. It's going to delay for 1 second, and then we're going to hear it again. If I play a note, we hear it twice. Cool. What if we want to put the option to turn this on or off that we hear the initial note, this one, I'm. Well, it's quite easy to do. Let's delete that for a minute. Let's nudge this over there to try to keep this a little clean. Max patches always get really ugly. Okay, so I could use a toggle here and say, turn that initial note on or off. However, remember a toggle just sends ones and zeros. It just turns things on and off, but I need an object that knows how to let that note through or not let it through, okay? So let's try to figure this out. What object would work when it's When the toggle says it's open to open something and let the note through. And then when the toggle says it's closed, close something and stop it from coming through. Any ideas? Open, closed, open closed? How about a gate? Gate would probably do it. So I'm going to grab an object say gate. All right. Let's look at gate. Let's zoom in a little bit here. Zero closes the gate, non zero opens the gate. That's exactly what this does. Incoming gated messages. So our messages go through the left side, and then gate output one, which is currently closed. So, let's put that there. All right. Now, We can turn it on or off, right? So let's say it's off now, so we should only hear one note, and it should be a second after I play it. There they are. Okay. So now let's open the gate. And now we should hear our initial note and our delayed notes. See It works. So we used a gate and a toggle to give us a dry wet amount. If we want to be a little extra, we could put a comment on that and say, dry wet. Sure. I put that right on that toggle. Neat. Now we know what that is. Cool. Okay. 42. Adding More Notes: All right. Let's add some more notes. So now let's say signal comes in. Let's say we hear it. Sure. And then we get the note again. Now, I actually don't think we need this anymore. Because now that we've given this 100 and we're not going to give it anything else, it can just stay there. We should still work. Yeah. Just fine without that. Okay, so let's say when this note comes, we want it to be an octave hire. Cool. So we've already done that. We just need to say plus, and then 12 notes up is going to be an octave. So now let's take this. Get rid of that, and send it down to make the note. All right. So now we're going to hear our initial note and a note an octave higher. Okay. Cool. Let's add some more notes. All we need to do is copy this. And let's say after 1,500 milliseconds, let's go down to a fifth, hoops which is seven half steps. We're going to take that note again. Delay it by 507 half steps. Take that into our note out. All right. Play note. Okay. Cool. Let's make another one. This one, I want to be earlier than this one. Let's go just 500. And what's my interval? How about a major seven? That's going to sound kind of funny. But let's do it anyway. Okay, I put that one in there. Now we should hear three notes. Okay. Now let's do one more and let's do an octave and a fifth. Let's see. 12 13. So that's 19. Connect it. All right. So now we Let me put these in order. That might help us here. So we're going to hear this note, We're going to hear half a second after I play a note. We're going to hear a major seventh. Then another half a second later, we're going to hear an octave. Then another half a second later, we're going to hear a fifth, and then let's set this to 2000. Another half a second later, we're going to hear another octave in a fifth. Neat. Now I can play a bunch of notes. Neat. And we made a cool little middy sequence. But we're not done. We can get weirder. Let's add some random elements into this. 43. Adding Randomization: Okay. So what if we wanted to say, This is a cool patch. I play a note, and it plays a bunch of other notes. But what if we wanted to say, you know, why am I playing notes? Why can't the computer play notes for me? So let's cut me out of this. I don't want to play notes anymore. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to tell the computer randomly choose a note at some interval. Okay? So what we need to do is send a random number to this. So let's go random. That's going to make a random number. Now, random is a little bit of a weird object. Because what we're going to give random for an argument, and you can look up the help file, but I'm going to help you is the range. So let's say we want a range of 24. Two octaves. Now, random is going to generate a number 0-24, but that's not really what we want. I'm going to give it a bang. And now I'll be able to see what it's doing. So I'm going to click this bang. It's going to generate a number 0-24. But that's too low. So what I need to do to get it into the range that we can really use it is add something to it to get it up where it'll be a good midi value. Let's add like 40. Oops. Make sure you have a space between your plus and your number or else it's not going to work. Okay. Now we're going to get numbers in the range of 64 to 84. That might actually be a little high. So let's go down to 30. Okay. Here we go. That looks better. Now, let's pump these over here. And I'm going to get rid of our no. Let's leave that. Okay, so now every time I click one of these, we're going to get a random number. It's going to put it into this box, and then all our delays will happen accordingly. Okay. It's cool. It's choosing notes now, but I still got to click it. Like, what am I? Like working for the computer? The computer should work for me. So I don't want to click anymore. So let's tell an object to click that button for me. So what we're going to use here is Metro. Metro is like a metronome, but we can tell it to do a whole bunch of stuff. So let's say metro 2000. So send a bang every 2,000 seconds or sorry, 2000 milliseconds, right? So I need a toggle to turn that on and off. And then we just need to send that bang right to there. As soon as I turn this on, it's going to start sending a bang every 2 seconds and that's going to generate random notes for me, transpose them, and then we're all off to the races. Here we go. Okay. That's cool. It's a little low. So let's go back to our this 30 and let's say 40 to get it somewhere better. Let's from the metronome on. Okay. Pretty cool, right? We're making some random stuff. Do you think we can make anything musical out of this? I've got a few ideas. This is where we just start going down a rabbit hole, and we can do this and do this and do this for months on end. And just be making crazy max patches. So we're not going to do this for months, but we are going to do it for at least one more video because I got an idea. 44. Getting in Key: Okay, in this video, I'm going to do two things. One is I'm going to force all the notes to conform to a key. And then the second thing I'm going to do is try to build more notes and make some harmony out of this. Okay. Let's do the second one first. So if I want these notes to pile up, one thing I could do is just make my metronome go faster. So if I set this to 1,000, we're going to start to get multiple notes happening at the same time because it's going to be halfway through all these delays, and then another note is going to get triggered. So we're going to start to get some harmonies. Let's hear it. So Okay. Cool, but it's ugly. So let's make this conform to a key. Now, there's two ways we could do this. One is that we could go through this random object and kind of tediously tell it notes it can and cannot choose or numbers that it can and cannot choose depending on a key. That would be difficult difficult, really time consuming to do. And you don't need to do that because you're in Max for Live. Live is already real good at conforming to a key. So let's go to our midi effects. Let's get out of what I meant. Let's go to scale. And let's pick a default scale. Let's say, Let's just do a good old minor scale. Or Dorian. Let's do a Dorian scale. Like. I'm going to put it out here. Now, what's going to happen here is that this is our midi sequence, right? Now, notes are going to come out of that, and then it's going to only make let notes through that are in key, and it's going to smash all the other notes into the key, right? So let's go back to our max patch and try it now. It's rather delightful, isn't it? Totally random. We're just letting the computer randomly make music for us here. I listen to this all day. Okay. So there's a bunch more stuff I could do with this. I could make it so that it has little pauses every now and then to make it a little more musical. I could make it so that we could adjust the tempo a little bit more. But let's move on from here because I want to get us into building some audio stuff. We're going to do one more big project together. But in between, we're going to learn how to deal with audio coming into your max patch. So, let me give you this patch, if you want it. You can load it up and just play with it. Remember, all you got to do really is turn this on in order for it to start working. You can also just play some notes still because we didn't turn that off. That would be this right here. That's still there. You could just play stuff. Neat. But if you want to turn that off, you could put it get rid of that. But okay, I'll give you this patch. And then we'll move on to audio stuff. Okay. 45. Tilde (~) Objects: Okay. Up next, we're going to deal with audio. Now, getting a live audio signal coming into your Max patch. It's not really trickier. It's just kind of a different set of objects. So first, let's go to Max for Live, and now we're going to go to Max audio effect. And I got to put it on an audio track. So there it is. Let's open it up. Okay. So there are two things that are different in what we see right here that I want to point out. First, you'll notice that our default objects here are plug in and plug out. Actually, there are three things different. I misspoke. Three main things that are different. The first is these two objects. Plug in and plug out. The plug in object basically means go to this track in live and grab our audio signal. Basically, it means this is connected directly to this. Okay? So our audio comes in here and goes directly to plug in and then In this case, it's set up to go directly to plug out. Plug out sends it right back to live. Now, thing number two. You'll notice these little symbols at the end. It's a Tilda, like you've seen a Tilda before. Most objects in Max that can handle a audio signal have a Tilda after their name. Like remember when we saw this. When we were looking at delays, we saw delay a bang delay Tilda delay a signal, signal means audio, in this case. Why is that? There's two reasons. One is that it's an easy way to kind of tell which objects can handle a signal, an audio signal, and which ones can't, right? Like Pipe can't. You can't give pipe an audio signal. It's not going to do it. We can tell that right away because it doesn't have a tiilda at the end of it. The second reason that we use that Tiilda is because it looks like a tiny sign wave, and it's kind of cute. So you know audio objects because they have a tela after them. Some of them, I have seen, like, a few that didn't, but almost all of them do. Okay. And then the third thing is these patch cables look different, don't they? They're like yellow dot striped, something, whatever you want to call that. That tells us that there's audio flowing through these cables, these patch cables. If I go, let's go to a delay and a number box. No audio signal here. You see it's just a black line, but these have this yellow dotted thing. That means there's an audio signal flowing through them. Okay. Okay. So it's just a quick way and a complicated patch to kind of see visually where your audio signal is. Now, there is sometimes where you'll see a third kind of cable, which is like a blue green kind of one, that's also striped like that, and that's going to carry a video signal. Which you can do in max. So you can keep an eye out for that. We're not going to cover doing video stuff here though. Okay. So three main things, Tilda objects, the the yellow dotted patch cables and the plug in plug out objects. Okay. All right. Next, let's talk about your audio settings. Okay. 46. Volume Control: Okay, let's get rid of this delay. So I'm going to put a clip onto this track. Okay? So if I hit play on this, and go back to Mac. That signal is coming through here. We can prove it. Let's unlock it. Let's get rid of one channel. We got rid of one channel, right? Let's get rid of two channels. Now we're not going to hear it because nothing is getting sent to plug out. Now, by default, that means that we don't really have to do anything with our system audio or any audio setup stuff in Max for Live. But I want to point out something to you anyway. If you go outside of Live, then you do have to do some audio set up stuff. The easiest way to get to it is if you go options. Audio status. You get this, where you can set your inputs and your outputs, and you can see some performance stuff, and you can turn your audio system on. Now, we don't need to do any of this because our audio system is live. So just know that that's there in case you're doing something outside of live. All right. Next, let's build a simple volume control into this, So let's take a volume fader. Should we use the live one? Okay. Let's use the live one. So let's go to live objects audio. There's live gain. All right? So let's zoom in on this a little bit. I'm zooming with just like the two finger pinch, by the way, but you can also do it up here with this percentage. Okay. So some of these live objects are a little funky because it's harder to see their inputs and outputs. So if you click on them, then you can put your mouse over the tops and bottoms and see the inputs and outputs. Okay. So the first input audio signal to be scaled. Perfect. That's what we want. So let's put that there. And the right audio signal to be scaled Channel two. Okay? Let's put that there. All right. Now we've got our signal coming in. Now, the bottom has a whole bunch of outputs. Why is that? Let's take a look. Live gain scaled signal Channel one. That's what we want to go to plug out number one. Scaled signal Channel two. That's what we want to go out to plug out. Now, what are the rest of these? Let's turn this down. This one is parameter value. That's going to tell you a number based on where this setting is? You can treat it just like a normal slider. Parameter raw value. This is going to give you a number 0-1, a floating point number for that whole slider. This last one amplitude of every channel. That's going to give you a probably is that a peak meter? I'm not sure. I don't really use that one. But that's cool. We only need these two. Now we've got a gain slider. Neat. Okay. 47. Microphone Input: All right, so what if we wanted a microphone to go right into our max patch? Well, the way this is set up is totally going to do that already. We just need to enable our mic over here. Okay? We can see my mic is already set up because it's coming in there. Hi. T. So all we need to do is arms to record. Okay. And now we are going in there. Let's go back to Max. All right, so we're not seeing it come in. We can see it's grayed out out here. Do you remember why? Think back to the recording section of this class? Why might we not be seeing that signal? And why is it all grayed out? If you guess monitor modes, you are correct. Tara. Now we are in. So we are also in high danger of feeding back. But my voice is now going directly into Max. Okay? I wouldn't be in danger of feeding back if I killed these. All right. Now I'm not feeding back because this signal isn't going to the output. It's just kind of sitting there. So we could do all kinds of funny stuff with it if we wanted. But that's how we get a microphone in. We just have to turn it on. Whatever is coming through this track, and this is true of session view arrangement view, it doesn't matter at all. Is going to go into this max patch as long as we're using this plug in object. Cool. All right. Next, let's look at a few of the audio UI objects, and then we'll make a little sound file player. Okay. 48. Audio UI Objects: Okay, so let's look at some more UI objects for audio. If we go here and then the audio tab. This EDAC as ADC, we don't really need. This is if you're not using live. If you're just using Max as a standalone. This is how you can get a microphone in and a speaker out really easily. Here's another gang control. Here's a peak level indicator. Let's look at that. It's a wave form. Filter graph is fun. Let's look at that. Let's look at this RMS meter. Ocilscope, spectroscope. Filter poles. Let's just try these ones first. Okay, so a VU meter. We can run a signal right into this, the same way we do everything else. There it is. Neat. This one is just another way of looking at a VU meter. This one has a weird little secret to it in that you can make it longer, and that's cool because you can see what's going on. But if you just change the shape of it to be vertical, it will eventually become vertical. So that can be handy. This one is a filter graph. So we're going to use this in a minute, but let me show you how it works. Let's look at our help file. With a filter graph, we have a UI for a filter, right? Like we can set all kind of fun stuff with it. We can set it to do automatable stuff. This is a weird object for a few reasons, and I'll show you why in a few minutes. But it is basically a filter, a nice filter. So we can use that. So let's take a look at this cilscope. I don't think this one works like in real time. Hello, hello hello? No, it doesn't. Let's look at the help file for it. Hello, hello, hello. So here we're taking in a signal. I think that's SG Tilda, I think is a square wave or something. So, this doesn't work in real time, but it can do some interesting stuff for you if you want to build some elaborate waveform editor type stuff. Cool. So a bunch of neat UI objects. Let's next, I want to make a quick little sound file player. But then we'll come back and our big project to end this class is going to use this filter graph. We're going to make kind of a weird automated filter kind of thing. So let's go into our little sound file player. This will be fun. 49. Simple Sound File Player: Okay, let's go back to basics. Let's get rid of all of this stuff. So we've got plug in and plug out. I want to make a way to just click Play and play a sound file in Max. Now, this doesn't have a huge practical purpose because we can just do this in live. But it's a great way to get to know a few objects and how Max works. So let's do it. So, we need an object that can open a file. Open an audio file specifically. We have a way to do that. So take a guess. What do you think the object that plays a sound file is going to be called. Maybe sound file player, pretty good guess, but not quite right. How about SF play? And then, of course, it's going to have a Tilda on it. All right? Play Sound file player. Now let's look at the help file. We can give it an argument of the number of channels. So that might be a good idea, two channels. So we can give it a message of just open, and that's going to trigger us to open a file. We can play, we can turn on looping by doing this combination of stuff. Pause, resume, seek jump to a specific spot. Or jump to a specific spot and play till the end of the file. And then we just output. We've got a little option here, bang when the file is done is what that's going to do, which can be handy sometimes. Okay, cool. So let's make a stereo file. So we're going to go SF play Tilda space two. All right. Now we need a message for open. We're going to connect that into this top one, and then we need to toggle to start it playing. Connect that into the same one. Now, this is an interesting thing. You'll notice that sometimes inlets can do multiple things depending on what's put into them. In this case, if we give it an open message, it knows that that means open a file, and if we give it a toggle, it knows that that means to play and stop, and it knows how to do a whole bunch of other things through this outlet. Through this inlet. Sorry. In this inlet, we can give it a speed, so we can slow it down and speed it up with this inlet. That's kind of fun. Okay. And then outlet is our Channel one output. So this is our audio output. So let's grab that. Let's do a gain slider for this, and let's do the Ableton one, but just the Max one, which looks like this. Okay, so I'm going to put that in there. And then I'll make another one. Let's put that over there and put that in there. All right. Now, one thing that you can do if you want to be a little extra go to here and let's add a little meter to go in between these two. It can be a nice touch, copy paste, and we'll put one here too. If you do this, in order to make it work, you need to run the signal again into the meter, or you could run it out of the gain slid into the meter if you wanted to show you the metered value. Then we need to run our signal into our plug out so we can hear it. And that's it. Let's lock our patch and click Open. That's going to take me out here and prompt me to open something. Let's find a random audio file. Show pan. Cool. All right. And now let's hit play. Now, we're not going to hear it. We got to turn our volume up. Neat. We did that. Lovely. Now, of course, we could put all kinds of other stuff right here after this signal. We could put delays, we could put distortions. We can put any effect you can possibly imagine. You'll also notice, let's stop this that we didn't use plug in at all, and that's fine. I could delete it. It doesn't matter. We're not using it. I'm not taking any signal in from live right now. I'm generating the signal with my sound file player object. All right, so let's get rid of that. Okay, so should you want to use this? I'll give this to you. Sometimes it's really valuable when you're learning Max, just to look at a patch like this and then just recreate it on your own and get it to work exactly the same. That's a really good way to study. So for that reason, I'm going to give you this patch. And then we're going to move on to making our beat based Q, one of my favorite projects. 50. Biquad~: Okay, so here's what we're going to make in this section. I call it a beat based E Q. This is something that well, let me just say this. Years and years ago. Maybe like ten years ago. I was at a conference, and I was hanging out with some of the folks that I know who worked for cycling 74 that make Max. And they were telling me that one of the big problems that Max has is that there's a lot of people who use it, but don't admit it, right? It's like their secret thing. It's their super secret weapon, and they don't want anyone to know how they do this one particular trick. But it's because of a max patch that they made or had made for them. So this thing we're going to build is one of my super secret tricks. It's not very secret anymore because I've made it in a few classes now. But it's a subtle effect. It can be a very dramatic effect, but it can also be a subtle effect. You won't find any commercial plug in that does this particular thing for you, okay? So if you don't like the sound of it, don't use it, but making it is a great way to understand a whole bunch of different objects and ideas that are built into Max for Live. Okay. So what this thing does is it's going to be an EQ, right? And we're going to make a stereo Q with two different cutoff frequencies. And we're going to change the cutoff frequency based on a random amount within a range and a eighth or 16th note on a beat. So that means our Q is going to go Like, really fast, jittering around like this and moving on our beat. It's a cool effect. It makes a little jittery sound. Sometimes it's so subtle, you can barely hear it, but it makes everything feel a little bit more alive to me sometimes. In the right context. So, let's try it. The first tool we're going to need is a byquad. So let's set ourselves up here. So let's go to Max for Live. This is going to be a Max audio effect. Let's put it on this track. And I'll leave that drum loop on there for now. Okay, let's open it up. Make it nice and big. Drag this down. Now, we are going to use both plug in and plug out here. So this is going to be important. And we're going to make this look pretty by the end of it. So I'm going to get rid of some of these comments. All right, let's break this because this is where we're going to build our stuff. Okay, so the bq. So we need two objects in order to make the filter portion of this work. We need what's called filter graph, which we've already seen. It's that, and then we need the bq. Tilda. Okay. Now, here's what's interesting about filter graph. Filter graph doesn't actually do any processing for us. Like, we're not going to run our signal into filter graph. That's not what we do. We're going to run it into Bicuad and then we're going to run filter graph into bquad. Filter graph is a fancy way to control bicuad which actually does the filtering. Let's go to Ptergraph help file, and you'll see what I mean. So out of filter graph is this huge string of numbers. We can move stuff around and we get these like monster string of numbers. That big string of numbers goes into Bicuad which is actually processing the audio. Okay? We can tell because our audio signal from dotted yellow line is only going into Bicuad and then output, right? So it's not going into the filter graph at all. So filter graph and bicuad are meant to be used together. So one thing I'd like to do. Let me open that back up is, you know, this is all set up, so nice with these comments and everything. I'm just going to grab it. So let's grab whoops. We could grab that, but I don't need that. Let's grab all of this copy, command C, close that. Don't save it. Delete this filter graph and put that one there. All right. And now we just need to connect it to our by quad. And we're good to go. Okay. Now, one thing that you'll notice here is that there are all these extra lines going up here and when I lock it, they're hidden. You can hide things on lock. So if you click on something and hit Command K, that means hide it when it's locked. But we don't need these, actually. So I'm going to get rid of them just to simplify what's going on and the set one. I do want these number boxes here though. I don't need this giant number box. The thing I really like is this mode setup. This is just letting me choose which kind of mode I want. I'm going to want a band pass probably for this. There's a few different ways you can do it. Okay. Let's go into a new video where we're talking about controlling this filter. 51. Controlling The Filter: Okay. So the next thing we're going to do is we need to set up this filter so that it randomly moves. Okay? So here's what we're going to do. I actually want to move the cutoff frequency. So here's our cutoff frequency, right? So let's lock it and then move this around. Okay. Cool. So let's figure out the range I want this to be in. I'm going to make sure I'm seeing this whole number box here. Okay. So I don't want it to go to extremes because you're going to get a pop if it goes way low really fast. So let's say I wanted to go down to maybe 400 and up to maybe 2000, okay? So 400 to 2000 is what I want. So now we've seen this before. I need a random number, and I need the range to be 400 to 2000. So that means the range of that, right? Like the total amount of numbers is actually going to be hundred because you just subtract the first number from the second, 400 from 2000. Now I'm going to make another object, and I'm going to add plus space 400. I'll make it so my lowest possible note is four value is 400 and my highest is 2000. That's going to get me right where I want to be. Let's put that over there and plug it into this box. Now, let's hit that with a bang to generate a random number, and we should see this jump around. I'm just clicking bangs and we're seeing that move around. Cool. Okay. Wonderful. Now, if I want to I could do the same thing with the game or with the Q or anything like that. I could also just click on this and say, I want this Q to be a lot tighter. Now we're going to jump around like that. That's cool. Great. Now, that's going into bquod and that's going to filter my sound. Okay? Now, how do I make this stereo? Bicuad can only process one signal. So I've got some choices to make if I want to make this stereo, which I do. Let's go to a new video and make a stereo. Okay. 52. Making it Stereo: Okay. So this is going to be our left channel. So if we want to do something with the right channel, we could do this could make another bicuad, run that in there, and then just use the same filter graph. There. But is that really what we want? Let's think about this because what that means is that the random filter is going to be the same for left and right. It's going to be moving in parallel. Everywhere it goes. The left and right are going to be exactly the same. That might be what you want. But it's not usually what I want for this particular kind of effect. I want something different. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make my window a little bit bigger because we're going to need it. And I'm going to say no to that, and I'm going to duplicate all of this Okay. Option click and drag. All right. Now I'm going to use a separate filter graph and a separate random number. That's important. If I just connect this random number to over here, it's going to be the same, right? Because I need a different random number if I want it to move around differently. Now I've got to click both of these. The easiest way to click two bangs is with a bang. Let's make this one nice and big. And we're going to connect that and that. Okay. Now, the big bang is going to hit each of these bangs, which is going to generate a random number for our cutoff frequency, move our filter around, and control each one of these separately. Now they're just moving around on their own. Pretty cool. Next thing I need is, I want to hit this at exactly a 16th note. I'm going to need to get the tempo and the 16th note from Live. Let's do that next. 53. Tempo from Live: Okay, so there's a few different ways to get information from Live. There's kind of a block of code sort of that we can set up a way where we can kind of ask what different things in live are doing. But in this case, if all we need is the tempo, there's a kind of easier way to do it. So I'm going to select all and I'm just going to drag this down a little bit to give me more space to work because my tempo stuff, I'm going to put up here. Not that I have to. I could put it anywhere. I I don't know. I put tempo stuff at the top. Okay, so I'm going to create an object called transport. Now, transport is going to go get information from live. Okay? So let's look at the help file. When I start this, it's going to output bars beats units where we're at the tempo, the resolution, the time signature, all kinds of stuff. But I have to set it up just like this. I have to start it, and then I need this metro four at active one. To just keep hitting the transport. So that is a way to get a ton of information from live. Look, I think I could do it. Yeah. Like, if I start it, it goes up here and it gets that from Live. So I could get bars that way. Okay, so I can get bars that way. I can get beats, but I want a 16th note. So this would be a classic way to go get information from Live. But there's a little bit easier way in our case. We could use this metro four N thing to get just what we want. So I'm going to grab that. I'm going to say, let's not use transport because in our case, all we really need is metro 16 active one. Now what does that mean? That means a metronome. We've seen that before. Give us a bang. 16 n means the 16th note of live. It's going to go in and the tempo of this beat is going to be the 16th note. Active means B active when live is active. There it is. Okay. So now if I stop my tempo in live, it stops. If I start it, it starts. So I don't really need this toggle here at all. Let's get rid of it. Okay, so now with that metro 16 n, it means that if live is going, the metro is going, and it's given me a 16th note. Couple of things. The transport is still useful for a lot of different stuff, so that's why I wanted to point it out. Another thing. You'll notice that this appears to be not clicking in a constant 16th note. The reason for that is that I think Max prioritizes the event and not the visual of it on the screen. It looks like this is like sloppy and not consistent, but it is super consistent. It's just the visual of it updating to show you the click is slower than the actual click. So don't worry about it looking bad. Listen to how it sounds. Okay, so we got this moving. It's time to hear it. The only thing that's left is to plug in our output. And then launch a clip. We could put a volume in here if we wanted to, but I don't think we need it. I'm going to save this and call it based Q. All right. And now let's launch that clip. Let's turn that up a little bit. Oh. Cool. One thing that's kind of fun is if you put the same clip over here and get them going the same time. Okay, now we've got one that's steady and one that's jumping around. It's kind of fun. This isn't probably the perfect clip for it, but I still kind of like the sound of it. Okay, we got one more thing to do, and that's let's make this pretty. Come in. 54. Presentation: Okay. So now we're going to make this look really nice and live. So our first question we need to ask is, what do we need to see? What do we need to see in live in order for this to work? Remember, we only have this kind of area down here. There's not much we really need to see. We could show our filters. Let's do that. So I'm going to select all, and then I'm going to go to shift everything down. Okay. Let's put this and the filters in there. That's kind of all we need. Maybe why don't we put a level meter. Okay. We'll put a left and right level meter. So there's left and there's right. I'm going to do this in two steps. First, I'm going to select everything that I want to be visible in our kind of cleaned up version. I want these two things. So I'm going to control, click on them and say, add to presentation. I want this. I'm going to control click, add to presentation, this, control click, add to presentation, and maybe this just for fun. Add to presentation. Now, I'm going to click this presentation mode at the bottom, and it hides everything except those things. I can also add more stuff here. Let's add a comment that's called J awesome based Q Nat. We'll make that as our heading If I control click on this and go to Inspector, we get some fonts and other controls. This inspector is a great place to be for different things. Font Let's go I don't know, 50. That's quite big. How about 25? It's better. Okay, so let's put that up here. And then we'll say here is Now, what's tricky right now is that we can't see that line that shows where what will show up in live. So let's fix that. We need to go to one special place. We're going to go up to view and then inspector window. This is an inspector for the whole patch. Okay. And we're going to go down to view and then open in presentation. Now, you have to click this. Always. You have to click this. If you want this to look nice in live, you need to click that button. Okay? Let's do that, and then we'll save it. Okay. So that's going to show the presentation view down in the window. So we can kind of see what we're doing now. We can see the line when we're unlocked. So let's leave it unlocked for a minute. Let's add another comment. And let's say Left, right outputs. Sure. We'll just label those as that. That's our output signal. And then this obviously isn't going to fit. We got to make it a lot smaller. Let's put this there. And here, it's kind of match those. There's kind of a grid system here that helps you with this kind of stuff. Okay? So let's say left filter. And then filter. And then this is like the trigger Trigger. Okay. Now, you'll see down here, it did not update because I have to save this. Save boom and now you see it update beautifully. Now let's close this and there it is. Look at that. Let's launch. Neat. We made a cool thing. Okay. Use this play around with it. You know, if you want to make it more elaborate and weird, you can do whatever you want with it. I'll give you this patch, and the next one, try to remake it again. It's a great way to practice, right? 55. Learning How to Learn Max: Okay. We did it. We got to the end of the Max section. We actually got to the end of the whole Live 12 shenanigans, but we'll talk about that in a minute. A couple more words about Live 12. The amount of Max for Live that we have learned in this section is probably like less than 1%, right? We learned big picture how it works. We learned how to use a few objects. And we learned how to use some of the user interface stuff. There is so, so, so much more, okay? And this takes me back to something I said early on, which is the only way to learn Max is to learn how to learn Max. What I hope is that now that we've gone through these couple of projects. What I hope is that now you can start to understand what is possible in Max, and how you might go about building it. You're not going to know everything. You're not going to know how to build it from beginning to end, from what you've learned in this class. But you might be able to find the right objects, look at those help files, look at the C also objects, and start going down the rabbit hole. You also know how to find some online resources, how to find other people that are into this through or other places. You could find your local Max user group. There might be one. Okay. Or you could go to cycling 70 four.com, and look and they have now a new thing that they're doing is Max certified trainers. So you could find an expert in your area. So, you don't know everything about Max from this class, but you have a very good start, okay? Max is a big topic. People spend their whole lives learning Max. It's a language, you know? It's a language, and you got to learn how to speak it and synthesize with it. So Okay, so that's everything I have to say about that. Let's go on to a couple last things. And then we're at the end. Oh, my God. 56. What Comes Next: All right. What comes next. At the end of every single one of these classes, all seven parts, I have given you like, what comes next? Take the next class in the series. But we're at the end. This is the end. However, there is more to learn about Ableton. We've learned an awful lot. But there's more to go. What I might suggest is pick a specialty that you want to do to learn even more. You could dive deeper into sound design. You could dive deeper into mixing and mastering. Dive deeper into making beats and just different kinds of production. I have tons of classes on all of those things. You might also want to get more in just to the music making side of it, in which case, I would recommend some music theory. Maybe even some music history. All of those things would be great ideas. So keep learning, keep exploring live. There's a lot more to learn. But if you're ready to just be done with my voice and looking at my face, then go and make some music. You know, spend a couple of months just making music and then come back, learn some more stuff. Okay. So, congratulations. You made it to the end. Let's do one more video where we do a proper send off. Right now. Okay. 57. Thanks for Watching!: All right. We did it. We made it to the end. Seven parts of Ableton Live 12. That was a lot. When I sat down and said, All right, they're coming out with a new version, got the Beta. I guess I'm going to make a seven part series. This is like twice as long as the six part series I made for Live 11 and Live ten. I just went into a lot more detail. I think necessary detail. I think I've gotten better at doing this over the years, and the classes just ended up longer. Um, but you stuck around all the way to the end. That is awesome. I wish I had, like, a prize for you. I will tell you one funny thing that nobody up until now knows about this series of classes. At one point, around Part three, I got this idea, and this was helped by a guy who works for me. We got this idea to start putting a secret code into these videos, and it would kind of spell out a weird URL, and if you went there, you would get a bunch of free stuff. I did it for like two or three videos, and the code was a kind of binary based code based on the order of these guitars. So if you were really paying attention, you might have noticed them move around for like two or three videos, but then it was so complicated to keep track of it. I just lost energy in doing it. So didn't actually go anywhere. It was only like two or three videos that actually did it. Maybe I'll do that again on the next one. H, But, thank you. Thank you so much for being a part of this series. I love making these classes. I love talking about this stuff. This is like my full time job now. Thanks for learning with me, and I'm looking forward to making more. I have a long list of classes that I have yet to make. So keep in touch, make sure you're subscribe to various things so that you hear from me, and I'll see you soon in another class. Thanks 1 million. Make some great music. I can't wait to hear music that you've made. Okay. There are various ways of sending your music to me for me to listen to. Depends on what platform you're watching this on, but if you look around, there's probably a way to message me and send me some stuff you're working on. I love hearing that stuff. All right. Thanks for everything. Bye. 58. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my e mail list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there. 59. Bonus Section - What's new in Live 12.1: Hey, everyone. We got a great little surprise these last few weeks, with the announcement of Ableton Live 12.1. So that's what we're gonna do. In these next, I think, 11 or so, videos, we're going to go through all the new features of Live 12.1. If you're using Live 12 and you want to take advantage of the stuff that's new in 12.1, and the second video, the one right after this, I'll go over kind of how to upgrade and how to install and all that stuff. Been using 12.1 for a while. I've been on the Beta team, so I'm really familiar with all of the new stuff, and I'm excited to show it to you, finally. Now, let me say this right out from the bat. Is that a phrase? I don't know. Doesn't matter. If you're using Live 12, there's not a lot of things that have changed, right? What we're mostly getting in 12.1 is additions. So everything you've learned about how to use Live 12 is pretty much still the same. There's really nothing like no buttons that have moved from here to there or no terminology that's changed. We're getting a handful of new things that we can do. But if you're like, I love Live 12 and I don't want to risk upgrading, that's fine. You can still use Live 12, and you'll be just fine. But Live 12.1 does have some really cool stuff. So I'm excited to show it to you. Let's dive in. 60. 12.1: Installation: Alright, so let's do a quick little round of installation. Real simple. If you already have Live 12, then we're just going to go to our settings. We're gonna go down here to license and updates, and we're going to see if you have any updates waiting for you here. Now, if you get automatic updates, you might already have 12.1. That's what happened to me. I have been avoiding updating to 121 until I finished another project. And then today I was like, Okay, I have, like, a separate Beta version, but I haven't updated to the full version. Until this morning, I went to do it so I could film these classes with the official version and not the Beta version. And it was already updated. I was like, Oh, I guess I already did that. So it happened automatically, but if it didn't happen automatically for you, go to the abton.com website, log in, and there will be a download waiting for you there. And you can download that, run the installer, and you're good to go. There's really nothing complicated about it. If you don't have a login to the Ableton website, it's probably a good idea to create one because there's a lot of free stuff you can get there. But if you bought your copy somewhere else, Create an Ableton Login. And if you're having any problems with that, just write to Ableton. They're very cool about these things and just say something's going weird, they'll help you get that sorted out so you can log in. Okay. Let's dive in. The first video I want to do is just going to be a big picture. Here's everything that's new and Live 12, 0.1, let's do that now. 61. 12.1: The Big Picture: Okay, what's new in Live 12.1, here's the big round up, right? We've got about eight things that are big new cool things, and then a whole big list of, like, quiet under the hood stuff. The quiet under the hood stuff mostly goes back to performance of the app. It loads faster. There's a couple extra settings deep down in some other in some instruments. There's some improved accessibility features and just an all around better performance. We won't go into the nitty gritty of all that stuff. That's all cool, and it's great, but you're never really going to interact with that because it's all behind the scenes. Let's focus on the big cool stuff. And the biggest and coolest is auto shift. This is auto shift. People have been saying for, I don't know, like a decade or so, why doesn't Ableton have a auto tune? Why doesn't it have a tuning system? Virtually every other DA has one. I don't know why Ableton took longer to get there than other DAs, but we're here now, so it's all good. This is Autotune. It's also a tuning plugin. You know, Autotune is kind of an effect where you're going to get that autotune sound. And you can get that with this, but you can also get the more subtle just tune stuff. You dial in your key and you say, Make the pitch quantized to that key. We'll go over how to use it shortly. Another big new one is the drum sampler. Drum sampler. This is designed for really one shot drums in order to make your own little drum kit out of it. It's really cool and really fun. We'll look at it shortly. The browser has some cool new features. The best one for me anyway, that I'm excited about is auto tagging. You can see that up there. What that means is you can import some samples, and Ableton is going to analyze them as you pull them in. If they're under 60 seconds, it's going to analyze them and put some tags on them that it thinks is correct. You can change those. I'll show you how that works in just a few minutes. Alright, then we have a new limiter and saturator not entirely new per se, but rebuilt. They're saying rebuilt from the ground up. Let's take a look at this limiter. We've got some new features in it. We've got true peak settings, soft clip. This maximized setting, we'll get into the details of that shortly. Same deal with this saturator. We've got kind of an expanded view now, so we can really kind of see in more detail what it's doing, also more settings. And supposedly, new algorithm under the scenes sounds richer, sounds fuller. It's great. Alright, so improvements to the MITI grid, something I'm really excited about. We've got the ability to filter notes. This is kind of wild. So if I go up here to this search, I can say, find me all pitches C, right? And I can just kind of highlight all the pitches C. There they are. Right? So it's just showing me the pitches that are C and then it's kind of graying out all the rest of them. So I can search by pitch. I can search by time, show all me the long stuff or short stuff, by chance, condition, countdown, duration, scale. Velocity, I could say, give me all the quiet velocity stuff. And then I could select that and boost all the quiet stuff, right? So I can really kind of zoom in on certain notes here. And two more. There's some really cool push updates. We'll talk about that. And one thing that I think is maybe the coolest thing in this whole update is the undue history. If we go to on a Mac Command Option Z, instead of undoing, you can see all of the things that I've done in the recent few minutes. And I can step backwards and just say, Oh, I want to go all the way back too when I put this device on here. So we've got this really cool undue history that I love. So that's the big picture. That's what's here. We're going to in the next, you know, ten or so videos, we're gonna dive into each of these things one by one. So let's start with the most probably celebrated one, and that is the autoshift effect. Here we go. 62. 12.1: Autoshift: All right. Auto tune. Let me play you a little example of what I have going on here. So I have this, like, just really chill piano bass and drums. The drums are acoustic drums with some brushes. This really chill kind of instrumental bad, part of a bigger project, but we don't need to go into that right now. Let's just hear what we've got so far. Okay. So I've added in this vocal. Now, you can use Auto shift on anything. It does not have to be just vocals. In fact, I think there's some really cool things you can do with it on instruments, and I'll show you some kind of fun effects you can do with it. But first, let's just throw a vocal in. So right now I've got this vocal, and it sounds kind of okay, but it's a little lot of key. Bim do behind the way. Okay, so, um, let's put Auto Shift on here. Okay. Now, the most simple and basic thing I can do is just bang this into the right key. So I know that this sample is in E minor because the name of the file is E minor. And I know this song is an A minor. So I'm just going to go down here. I'm going to say root, A, scale minor. All right. Now let's hear it. B Hi. Day Cool, right? So it adjusted some notes and put them into the key that I want. That's great. But there's a whole bunch of other things we could do with this too. Let's try adding an octave to this to simulate, like, a double tracked vocal that has an octave. So there's a few different ways I could do this. If I want to just take the octave down on this, I can just go here to pitch and just crank it down 12 steps. Bi Hi. Day. Yeah, if you're hearing all those artifacts, this is kind of a dirty sample to begin with. So we'll clean those up in another step outside of Auto Shift. But for now, that gets you the down in octave. If I want to hear them both at once, I could put this in a rack. In fact, let's do that. So I'm going to go Command G. Open the chains. Let's duplicate this chain. Okay? So with this chain, we'll get rid of the octave with this chain. We'll add it. So now we're going to hear it double tracked at an octave. ***** Now, we also have an LFO here so we can do a little bit of modulation. Limb turn it on. So we can adjust the delay and the attack kind of extremes of it. Here we can put the delay time in Hertz or beats divisions of the beat, which I prefer can change this to a sign. And then we can decide where it's going to affect. We can affect the panning, volume, format, or pitch. The form the formant is this knob. That's kind of like the shape of your mouth in a way. You can think of it as the tone. B I like all that dirtiness. The Let's stick these down. So there's a lot we can do with this. One other thing we might do is, let's explore this dry wet. What that's going to let is some of the untuned back in. Now, in this case, because we shifted the whole key, it's not gonna sound great. But if you have a singer who's really good and they sound great, put this on it, and then pull that dry wet back just a little bit. So that way, we're tuning their voice, but we're letting some of the untuned in. Now, assuming your singer is like a good singer, that's gonna create maybe almost like a chorus effect. But here's going to be just kind of a mess. See, when there's a note that change. You get kind of a harmony. So with this tool, we could also add harmonies and do even some more dramatic things like that. It's pretty powerful. And it's really kind of low form factor. I like that it's a really simple looking app, but it's actually, like, pretty huge. That's Autotun, you know? It also obviously has midi in, so you can control. You can play pitches. You can add things and this live mode for if you're running a live vocal through it. And I'm pretty sure what that's going to do is just devote more resources to the processing so that it can keep up in live. It probably doesn't change the tone very much. Alright, so that is our new auto shift. Exciting. 63. 12.1: Drum Sampler: Okay, let's talk about drum sampler. Now, this is kind of like simpler in a way, where we have this drum sampler. We can put it on a mini track, and we can add a sample. So let's just go to Well, maybe I don't want a Beethoven string quartet. It's really designed for one shot samples, so let's just find a random thing. Cool. Clap. Okay, so now we can play some midi notes and trigger this sample. We can do all the things you would expect. We've got, you know, attack, hole decay, transposition, detune, mode, trigger or gait. We've seen these things and other effects before. The biggest new thing here is these two blocks here. We've got a couple controls that are kind of that are kind of wild. Over on the right side, we've got these filters, resonance and frequency, nothing crazy. It's a filter. We know how filters work. However, um, having one built right into your drum sample player can be pretty handy. But the coolest thing is this part. So with this, we can load up any kind of effect from this list, and then we can adjust these two parameters just with this cool little dial, right? We can go around it. So these weird looking four lines are the symbol just for stretch, right? The lines are supposed to look like they're stretching further apart. So with this, let's solo this. Okay, let's loop that. Okay. Now let's stretch it a little bit. Speed up that loop a little bit. So we can do some cool stuff. We've got loop, in which case, we're going to control how it loops. That would be fun to automate. Just make some really cool glitchy effects. Pitch envelope punch is going to give us Just that sharper attack. It's not really doing much in this case. Ring mod, FM, sub oscillator noise, eight bit. We're getting really into some sound designing things here. But that's what's so cool about the new drum sampler is that it's got a lot of sound design possibilities built right in. 64. 12.1: Auto Tagging: Okay, as you might be familiar with, we've had this tagging system in the browser since Lab 12, I think, maybe before that. But now, I think it came out in lab 12. So this makes it easier to find samples in our huge library. So what happens now is that we are able to import new samples and have them automatically tagged so that they're easier to find. Now, if you have any samples that are under 60 seconds, when you drag them in, this is what will happen. So I've got this little baseline sample that I'm just grabbing off splice. It's no big deal of a sample. But I want to put it here. Okay, so I'm just going to drop this into this samples collection. It's going to take a second for it to pop up here, because it's doing this auto tagging, there it goes. So now we can look over here. Let's make this a little bit bigger. And we can see that Live tagged it as a loop. It tagged it as synth base, and that's it. Which is cool. It is. It is both of those things, and it will end up exactly where I want it to that way. So that's going to make just searching for sounds, which is my least favorite thing to do in all of everything, much easier. 65. 12.1: ImprovedLimiter & Saturator: Okay, up next, let's talk about the limiter and saturatorT things in this one. So both of these devices are audio effects, and neither of them are new, but we have a kind of rebuilt set of functions in them. So new stuff, some new stuff under the hood, and some new stuff on top of the hood. Is that the phrase? No, some stuff we can work with. So let's focus on limiter first. So the biggest thing here is we have a couple new modes like mid side. We have soft clip, true peak. Soft clip is going to give you that gentle distortion kind of reminiscent of analog gear being pushed a little too hard. Maximize is really just going to push everything out for better gain staging. Can make that a little bit easier. Our meters are not. In fact, let's just focus in on this little drum. There's that soft clip side. Our release curve is new too. So, cool new limiting features. Now let's look at our saturator. Our saturator now has a couple of new things, and the biggest one is this window. If we open up with this toggle up here, we can see two kind of curves. We see whatever this is showing and then this color curve. Here again, we've got the soft clip if you want that on there or because it's saturator, we have a hard clip. The control for this view here, if we want to turn color on or off. We also have this new base shaper tool. And then in the color curve, we can kind of work it like an EQ and, you know, just kind of drive the color of our saturation here. Let's hear it. So quiet. Obviously, very much. It heavy. Let's get rid of that bay shaper, let's see analogue clip. So a lot of new stuff in here. I think the color of the saturator being able to control that kind of distortion that it's giving us is a really nice addition, and it's gonna be really fun to play with. 66. 12.1: New MIDI Stuff: Okay, well, let's do it just in case. Okay, let's look a little bit more at this this new MITI trick we can do. So I'm going to look at a MIDI file. This is a whole bunch of just piano stuff. And basically, what we have here that's so cool is this search feature. So let's say, I want to go down here. I want to grab all the really loud notes and pull them back a little bit. And the reason there's a lot of reasons I might do that. And in this particular case, it's because I'm using this really nice piano sample library here, but it really responds well with a softer touch. If you hit it hard, the samples up in that area, I don't love. So I'm going to chill it down. So instead of going through here and trying to select only the loudest bits like that, kind of which works, I can do it this way. So minimum, let's say I want everything in, like, the 90. Let's put that at 90 and maximum 120. Okay. So here's all of my loud notes. So now I'm going to grab them proportionally, pull them down just a little bit. And that's going to sweeten them up a little and get them in the range of my better samples. Neat. So there's a bunch of other things we can do with this. We can look for stuff in the scale. So if we want to say, what notes that I have here are not in this scale. If you hear something funny in your notes, this might be a good way to track it down. So I could say, Okay, C Phrygian. Sure. Notes are in C Phrygian, okay? Those are the notes that are in C Phrygian. If I say what notes are not in C Phrygian. These notes are not in C Phrygian, okay? So if I'm trying to get this in C Phrygian, I could use that and select them, and then I know I can own keys and move them around. So that's a great tool for just seeing if there's anything out of key, trying to track down notes that might sound funny. There's a lot of other things that are really useful about this. It's kind of a cool trick. Duration. Find all the long notes or the short notes. I'm not sure what count is. Oh, find the note on every, like, beat or something. Condition, is it active chance? So some cool new midi features. 67. 12.1: Push Updates: A. Alright, let's talk about the push. There's a lot of new stuff in the push. Nothing that I can show you really well by zooming in my camera on the push. We've got the ability to set up new macros and, like, variations of macros. The way you can do it in Live, you can now do it on the push, the auto tagging of samples and the ability to save default sets and template sets on the push. Now, maybe you also heard about the new Ableton device, the Ableton Move. There is obviously support for that that came with it. The Ableton Move is a whole new controller. It looks really cool. I don't have one yet. But I will be getting one soon. So because of the Ableton Move, there's a bunch of new updates that you might not have heard about to something called the Ableton Cloud. This is how we're easily able to throw sets between a desktop or a laptop and a push and a move. They're all sinking to a Cloud service that Ableton has started. Bunch of improvements for that that make move work really well, like, on the go and stuff like that. So if you're gonna get a move, keep an eye out for Ableton Cloud, that's going to be important to you. 68. 12.1: Undo History: Last but not least, something that's really important to me that I'm really excited to have, and that is an undue history. Every program I've ever worked with, I'm like, Why don't you have an undue history? I'm sure it causes some resources to create and maintain that list, but so valuable. So, so, so valuable. So if I want to undo, I can still do Command Z and undo, and I can press Command Z all day long. But if you've ever done that thing where you're like, Command Z, Command Z, is that what I want? Nope, Command Z. Is that what I want? Nope, Command Z. And you're like, stepping backwards in time. It's kind of brutal. So there's an easier way now. Instead of Command Z, we're going to go Command Option Z, and that's going to get us a huge, long list of everything you've done in the day. I don't know how long this goes back. It might go back till you save it. Um, but this is basically going back all the way to when I opened it. So the first thing you can see is open live set. So it goes back, you know, the last right now, it's going back the last like 4 hours. That's great. Move notes. If I select one of these, if I say, oh, yeah. When I deactivated that clip, that's about where I want to be. I can click that. And now I'm back to that spot. We just jumped back to it. That's where what version we're on now. Even though forward in time is great out, we can still jump back forward. So it's a pretty cool trick. And a time saver for sure. 69. 12.1: Thanks for Watching: Alright, that is it. Like I said, there's a whole bunch more stuff under the hood, performance improvements. But as users, those are the big major updates in 121. We don't get updates like this very often with Live. We usually get big updates in the big numbered versions. Like, 12 was a big update. And this time, I think there was just a handful of things that weren't quite ready for 12, so they did a big 121 to get us all these cool new tools. So check it out, have fun, make some great music, and keep on being awesome. Bye.