J. Anthony Allen introduces Max for Live by building a live-coded patch that controls delay taps, filtering, panning, and clip launching in Ableton. He emphasizes learning to think like Max rather than memorizing objects, so you can create custom audio tools and instruments beyond existing plugins.
Here is getting the audio signal from live for this track and down at the bottom, sending it back. One thing very importantly, which is the bangs. You give it anything and it goes bang. It's kind of like the Hodor of Max. If you're a Game of Thrones fan, remember the character Hodor? All he knows how to do is say Hodor, but it's kind of the answer for everything. It's a lot like that. So you can give it a whole bunch of information. What if we wanted to build a way to be able to decide whether or not we want to hear that dry signal? Aha. Right. This will be fun. Hey, this is the heart of my arpeggiator right here, because I've got my delay stuff for all my MIDI values, my transposition and my delay amount. Now we're just scaling the volume. Scaling the volume is going to be a little trickier when we go into these other taps because we want it to be a percentage of this one all the time. So we're going to have to do a couple little tricks there. But it's okay. It'll be fun. So scaling the volume. Check. Let's get rid of that one. Send it a message for what kind of filter you want. You can directly control the gain, the Q cutoff frequency, and you can actually use this cascade tool to string a whole bunch of them together. This transport is basically talking to the live transport. We've got it set up. So we've seen, I think we've seen Metro before. Metro is just a metronome. My filter moves around. So this is maybe somewhat interesting. The way this gets interesting is if you put like a beat on this and change it to a 16th note and it starts doing that. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this class. What you're hearing here is just a patch I made at the end of this class. So I actually make the class and then jump back to the beginning and make this intro video. So this is a patch where I've got Max for live, deciding how to control the panning, the volume and launching clips, even the track names on its own. It's totally just deciding on its own when to do this. Now, by the time we get done with this class, you're going to understand how everything in this patch works. You're going to be able to do this. This is kind of a silly example of the things you'll be able to do, but this class is. I've taught this class in person a bunch of times. It's hard. It's hard to Learn Max in a short setting like this. But I have this motto that I use for teaching Max all the time, whether it's a short class or a long class. And that theory is that you can't possibly learn Max in a short amount of time or even a year. It's an ongoing thing. You're always learning new stuff. So what my goal is for this class and the way that I teach it is not teaching you to memorize what objects do, how the language works and all that stuff. The way that I teach it is I want you to understand, A, how to think like Max 4 live, and B, how to learn Max. That's what I want you to know, is how to get inside Max for Live and know what you don't know and know how to find the answer. So I teach this class a lot by I'm going to show you how to look stuff up. I'm also going to show you, you know, a lot about how it works and what objects are and all these other things. But in the end, you're not going to know everything you need to know about Max for Live to be able to launch rocket ships with Max 4 live. But you will know how to find those answers to anything you need. That's what we're going to do. I'm going to show you how a lot of stuff works. We're going to make a ton of patches. I think we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6. Six patches that we make in the process of this class that I'll also give you my version of to download and pick apart and use for whatever you want. So a lot of patches. We're gonna be building stuff. We're gonna make stuff. We're going to. We're gonna learn how to learn Max. Max for Live. That's what this is all about. And I am 100% confident that at the end of this, you'll be able to make some really cool effects, some really cool instruments, some really cool MIDI effects that you can't find elsewhere. That one weird thing that you want to do that no plugin maker has sat down to build. That's what you can do. That's what you can do with Max for Live. You can do anything you can imagine in Ableton Live once you know how to program Max for Live. And it's not as hard as you think. It's. It's actually, you know, if you've looked at other programming languages before, it's one of the easiest ones because it's not really like a language that you have to type lots of stuff. It's little blocks that you hook together. You'll see. So let's dive in and let's start learning Max for live. This is going to change your life.
