Ableton Forum

So I am just barely getting my toes wet with CV control of my sole hardware synth and trying to understand my options in integration with Live. I have an Abstrakt Avalon Bassline and a MOTU Ultralite so my plan was to grab some Expert Sleepers cables to patch from the Ultralite to the CV inputs of the Avalon.

What I am weighing right now is whether there is value in purchasing the Silent Way VSTs to control. I already have M4L and I see some patches on maxforlive.com that claim to produce CV.

Is there any compelling reason to actually get Silent Way as opposed to using M4L to do similar things? Am I correct in assuming I could technically build in M4L what might be done with Silent Way? I understand that Silent Way might have a large amount of prebuilt tools that may not yet be built in M4L. Curious if there are any tools in that set that might be a selling point for SW.

Thanks for the advice.

You can absolutely build what you need with M4L. I just got into Eurorack last year and the first thing I did was buy eight of the Expert Sleepers cables to send CV from the outs on my MOTU 828x via signals generated with a M4L device I created.

That said, if you're not into Max patching already, then Silent Way will be more of a hit-the-ground-running solution. I'm not sure what's out there in terms of M4L devices for CV, but I'm sure someone has made something and put it on maxforlive.com.

There is a Max Package available via Max's package manager that is a CV toolset, but those are just Max patches, not M4L devices, so there would still be some conversion to do on your part to get it running as a M4L device.

Thanks for confirming my understanding. I'll think I'll try my hand with M4L first before dropping change on Silent Way.