The main thing Max For Live owners can take advantages are three new synths that are completely unlike the Analog and Operator synths you get with Live itself: Bass, Poli and Multi. It’s better to think of Max For Live as a workshop than a coding environment: you can create and re-engineer things if you know how, but there’s plenty of finished prototypes lying around too.
While there’s a fairly justifiable idea of Max For Live as a complicated coding environment for building your own instruments, it’s also a place for hosting some brilliant pre-designed tools that don’t require any wider knowledge.
Max For Live is an optional extra, but if you don’t use the software then now might be the time to look into getting into it. It doesn’t sound like much, but if you’re using it in tandem with Push, you should be able to keep everything in check and reduce the time spent mixing things down at the end. Now they will show a combination of both peak level and average volume, making it much easier to keep track of not just individual instruments but the overall dynamic on the master channel. Live 9.5 however is now a much better tool for this, and it’s down to the overhauled meters.
One of the criticisms often levelled at Live is that it’s not as good as programs like Logic or Pro Tools for recording live instruments. There’s nothing quite like a vintage hardware filter, and these are nothing comparable, but if you tweak these filters in the right way you can get them to squeal in a really satisfying way. They add an extra bit of depth that’s been sorely missing from Live’s sound engine. Previously you might have had to use a Compressor or a Saturator to make Live’s sounds warmer or fuller, but the new filters – selected from a drop-down menu in each device – have the option to add a touch of overdrive in the device itself. The new filters have been developed with Cytomic (responsible for the glue compressors in Live) and built into some of Live’s key devices: Operator, Sampler, the new Simpler and of course Auto Filter. However, they do significantly broaden the kind of sound that Live can make.
There are people who are always going to maintain that an analog filter sounds better than anything software can create, and Ableton’s new analog modelled filters probably won’t change their mind. Simpler wasn’t something I previously gave much thought to, but Ableton has turned it into the best bundled instrument in Live. Obviously it works best with tracks that have a clearly defined beat, but use the right loop and you can re-contextualise a track in seconds. Loop slicing in samplers has been around for longer than Live itself, as has the ability to “play” and shuffle a loop with MIDI, but Ableton’s new Simpler has combined all the existing technology into something really concise and easy to use. In the same way that Live analyses and adds cue points to a track when dropped into an audio track, Simpler will automatically determine the peaks of the sample and map each one to your keyboard.
The most impressive favourite mode is Slice. When Ableton demonstrated the mode at the launch they even made a sample of U2’s ‘With Or Without You’ sound unrecognisable. If you enable Glide mode you can even transpose a sample without starting from the beginning again, which allows for some really unique effects. As Simpler now uses Ableton’s timestretching algorithm however, the sample can be played at any pitch and maintain the same tempo. Drop a sample in and you have three key functions to choose from: Classic, One-Shot and Slice.Ĭlassic and One-shot are self-explanatory – one lets you play the sample as it is for as long as you hold the key down, the other will play the sample out to the end. It’s an instrument that’s always lived in the shadow of Ableton’s more powerful Sampler device, but now it’s about the most enjoyable sampler I’ve ever used. The big thing distinguishing the new Push from the original is the way you can work with samples, and it’s all down to the new version of Simpler.