Ableton Forum

I thought I'd start a thread where we can all share our favourite M4L devices. There's so many out there it's hard to work out what's really good and what's really not. Hopefully this thread can become a reference to find some great Live mangling/controlling devices.

So here are two of my faves:

FRETpad
http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=382
Lets you play the Launchpad like a fretboard. Very simple but works well.

Transforminator
http://maxupyourlive.blogspot.com/2010/ ... n-101.html
A granular sample masher. Again very straightforward but delivers some interesting results. There's a good video on the site of it in action.

So... what you got?



Dom

Nice idea... here are my nominations:

Tapestop
http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=217
Nice simple device to emulate a tapestop, i.e. the sound you get when your turntable dies!

Reverser
http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=130
Another simple one that reverses audio in real time.

sbx 2049 1.0
http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=329
The big Skinnerbox patch, an obvious choice. This is a nice noisy sequencer/synth combo with a surprisingly scary "random" button. Can be a little heavy on the CPU, and I recommend not trying to pattrize it & morph snapshots as I did once as this is an instant gauranteed LiveCrash as 50+ knobs attempt to morph at once. Still good fun.

...and I love the [few] devices I've posted because, well, they're mine!
-Hamish

Hello Hamish

I discovered the sbx 2049 via the video on the Ableton main site just this week. Very cool drum machine and I did hit the randomise button... my computer handled it good though. However I prefer just to randomise single hits whilst playing as it suddenly changes the feel but in a subtle way.

Great device!

More please

+1 for Tapestop and Reverser.... You can easily edit and modulate to get some cool effects out of them!

Cheers
D

domtak wrote:I discovered the sbx 2049 via the video on the Ableton main site just this week. Very cool drum machine and I did hit the randomise button... my computer handled it good though. However I prefer just to randomise single hits whilst playing as it suddenly changes the feel but in a subtle way.

My computer had no issue with the randomize button either, but I had no workflow or good way to work with it. Even randomizing a hit is neat but too unreproducible, unless you're happy recording all your noodling directly to audio. This was when I decided to pattr-ize the device so that I could randomize hits or the whole device and then save a snapshot when I liked the sound. My CPU issues started when I tried to morph between these snapshots, at least when I used automated ramps to morph with clips in Live. I think the ramps simply sent too many updates to my SBX, and each one was changing EVERY parameter. I got some ridiculous crashes with this but by changing the ramps to steps I was able to get what I wanted which was controlled morphing between sbx presets. This is why I love M4L, I can take two things I find useful, sbx and the Covert Ops morphing presets stuff, and merge them togehter to create something truly novel and useful.
-Hamish

Anyone else have favs to share?

Still liking Beatwife's SEQ FX: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h3mI-kSgRM

And the ML-185: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=75

And some of the device randomizers. (like http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=166)

Lots of cool utilitities like these too are my fav: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/index ... mit=Search

sbx 2049
Schwarzonator
ML-185
and tapestop so far!

The Beatwife's SEQ FX seems to be pretty cool.
Have not known it up to now ad will check it out when i be back home!

Here are a few:

Grain freeze
Sev by Katsuhiro Chiba 1.0.3
JG.SpectralDelay 1.4.3
Christian Kleine's M4L set
Max Fuel, the First M4L set
Kflux
DensityM4L

Whenever Mr. Henke gets around to selling his "Granulator" device, I'll buy it in a heartbeat!

Live.API.Explorer is my favourite!

docprosper wrote:Nice idea... here are my nominations:
Reverser
http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=130
Another simple one that reverses audio in real time.

If you are interested by this kind of things, I added another way to reverse in real time with a freeze mode too.
You can get interesting textures if you play a little bit with it...

http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device.php?id=163

we need patch rating system on maxforlive, number of downloads is not very valuable if the developer has done good work, also there are already many patches with same, similar, overlapping funtionality.

Also if externals are available for Win/OS X, some dont mention this.

I thought there already was a rating system; IMO the real problem is that it's not really used that much.
-Hamish

docprosper wrote:I thought there already was a rating system; IMO the real problem is that it's not really used that much.
-Hamish

Yep. You are exactly right. You can rate the devices and browse/search by highest rating, but it's not that useful. People don't rate devices nearly enough. Even devices that have 10 comments of "wow this is great" may not have a single rating.

not sure what to do about that.

everything i can think of to prompt people to rate devices they've already downloaded pretty much requires that they are logged in. Now that you can download without logging in, that doesn't work either.

The only problem I have with browsing for devices in MaxForLive.com is that most devices are tagged with more than one category. So for example if I am browsing the "Hardware Control" category I also see all the sequencer devices and not just the devices for controlling external hardware.