I’m going to close enrollment for the Ableton Cookbook Live Course in 6 days.

You’re probably pulling your hair out, gnashing your teeth and beating your breast, crying “Why?”

Well, calm down.

I’m closing enrollment because the amount of students has become somewhat…unmanageable. As you know, when I answer emails, I REALLY answer emails.

But this takes time. Like, to the tune of hours a day. And, unfortunately, I have other things to attend to.

“What things?”, you may ask.

I have been on a super secret mission, calling upon all of my internetting powers to improve the course even more. I’m really excited for the upcoming changes to the site and to the course, but these changes also take time.

So, in the interest of providing a high quality product, both now and the future, I’m closing enrollment for the Ableton Live Course (and Complete) on May 16th at midnight. Get in on this while the getting is open.

Sign up Now

P.S. Remember, Email List Members, apply your discount at checkout to get big ole discount!

Where are the Ableton Shares of yesteryear? Oh, Ableton Share, how little we knew ye.

And so on.

Ableton Share promised to make sharing among Live users effortless, by some undisclosed means. It was touted as one of the main selling points of Live 8 (a fact that you can read about in all its ranty glory at the Ableton forum), but the feature disappeared quickly after being introduced. But due to its ungoogleability and some great damage control on the part of Ableton, I haven’t even been able to figure out what it was, much less what was wrong with it.

But I am curious, since it seems like it could have revolutionized the way we make music.

Right now, producing music is often a solitary activity (your cat does not count as a companion). But what if we had a service like Ableton Share to help us not only connect with collaborators, but to discover new ones as well?

Many people have gotten into using Ableton’s “Collect All and Save” feature and a Dropbox account in order to share their sets with their collaborators. My experience with this has been mixed, tbh. It still seems like a kludge to me, which is great, but I’ve always said “Dare to Dream” (my therapist gave me a poster to that effect). I’ll tell you my preferred method after the fold.

One possible solution to the drawbacks of Dropbox is Gobbler. Gobbler is a new service that is optimized for sharing big media projects. It has all of the aspects of Dropbox that Ableton users like (store and share files, easily revert back to prior saves), plus some added integration. But Gobbler comes with a desktop client that automatically backs up projects that you’ve indicated to it. The desktop client also has the good manners to only run while you’re not doing processor intensive tasks in your DAW. This, plus the fact that it only uploads resources that have changed, means that it is actually pretty light on the system. Amazing, considering how much data is being thrown around.

But more and more, I realize that I don’t want a replacement for Ableton Share. What I really want is a Github for Ableton sets. I want Ableton Social.

For those of you not familiar, Github is a “social coding” website. In exchange for free hosting, your code is open to the world. This means that anybody can “fork” your code and make their own version.

Git also distinguishes between “saving” and “commiting.” This is what differentiates it from merely “backing up.” The default is that your local machine is NOT synced exactly with your Github account, even though it may be saved. To me, this is a great compromise between being totally open and making sure that the shared version of your work is up to snuff.

Dropbox may never have this functionality. But Gobbler already has the infrastructure to do this and knows this market (although they seem to be focusing more on professional studio engineers right now). Imagine if you could go over to Gobbler.com and “fork” a version of a new Live set by Bassnectar and then totally reimagine it and save it to your own account? All of the forking and versioning could be stored in a log file, showing everyone who’d ever worked on a project. Since an .als file is just an XML file, new .als’s can be parsed on the server and a human readable description of the track changes can be posted alongside the set. If you see someone always doing interesting stuff, you can “follow” them and keep track of whenever they commit a new project that you can fork. Instead of just being a tool for collaboration between people who you already know, Gobbler can be a way to discover new collaborators.

This might be pie in the sky. But Gobbler is off to a good start and, should they choose to go this route, they could totally change how we make music. And, they are offering free storage space right now (up to 5GB), so now is the time to try it out.

Do you guys think that there is a room for a more social music production collaboration tool, like a Github for Ableton sets?

Make sure to tune in next week, when we discuss how to extend any MIDI controller with the power of MaxforLive!

We sat down to have a beer(s) and debrief about a presentation that he gave recently about novel ways to make some money in this business that we call: Music. I’m going to put up a few of his insights over the next week or so, but let’s begin with James’ ideas regarding getting sponsored as a musician.

Most bands (and musical acts in general) do not take enough advantage of sponsorship opportunities that are available to them. James pointed out that, while most of us think of sponsorship as an all or nothing affair, this is not the case. Between getting a free MPC in the shape of your face from Akai and paying your own way by hawking your mother’s decorative plates, there’s a spectrum of options. James pointed out that almost all businesses have at least some budget for marketing, which they would love to spend on putting a banner up at the Trance night that you hold in your basement. And, if you secure a couple of these sponsorships, then you’ll be able to fund as many things as if you’d gotten a big sponsorship from Red Bull.

The question is, What should you spend the sponsorship money on? Because, let’s face it: very few sponsorships are going to just ship you 50 gold bullion (too few, really).

Transportation: James told me of a few bands that paid for their trip to SXSW by wrapping their van in a sticker from a local business. Bonus points if this company is something that you actually use/endorse. Double bonus points if this company is a strip club.

Food: James didn’t mention this, but I have some friends in bands who have gotten their food paid for by a local business. The most notable (notorious?) version of this is the deal with the devil that Taco Bell makes with many bands, giving them free Taco Bell while they are on tour. NOTE: The Ableton Cookbook does not condone eating only Taco Bell for a month.

Secondary Supplies: I don’t know about you, but I probably spend a couple hundred dollars a year on weird things like cords, adaptors, etc. Why not ask a local electronics supply store to give these to you in exchange for putting their name on your website, banners, etc.?

But who should you approach about these sponsorships and with what information? Who you should approach will vary from company to company. Smaller businesses can be just one person, but larger companies will have an actual marketing department. Whatever you do, spend some time on ye olde Google and try to figure out who the right contact person is in that organization. Email bombing the accounting department of Scion A/V probably won’t get you anywhere.

When you approach these people, though, remember that you are offering them a chance at exposure to your audience. So, if you can, bring information about how many people come to your website, how many come to your shows, where you’ve played before, how many Tumblr followers you have, how good you are at Skyrim, etc. The last two are optional. This information will come in handy in a variety of situations, so keep it somewhere accessible.

While this kind of sponsorship isn’t actually “making money” in the sense of poeple sending you checks, it will help you cover costs, which will allow you to keep a bigger cut of whatever t-shirts, thongs and lunchboxes you sell at your shows. And, because you’ll be focusing on your local businesses, you’ll be helping the local economy and all that jazz.

Do you guys have any other questions or stories about sponsorships?

So, I (along with some help with my homie Nate) decided to embark on this tutorial series to show you how to get down the very basics of Max 4 Live. And I’ve decided to do it by focusing on a number of small projects, after the completion of which we’ll have a pretty good handle on the necessary components of Max 4 Live. But what that means is that we’re going to skip the preliminaries and jump right in by starting to build a simple MIDI arpeggiator!

In this video, we’ll cover: How to get MIDI in and out of an M4L device, How to monitor what’s happening in M4L, Simple math in M4L, Using sliders and the unpack objects.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

So, as those of who follow me on Twitter may be tired of hearing about, I’ve been working with my main man Nate to get together some basic video tutorials together on how to use Max for Live. But it might be worth taking a moment asking ourselves, Why do we care?

As many of you know, Max for Live is basically a port of Max/MSP, a graphical programming environment that can be used for normal computation (boring) or Audio Video applications (huzzah!). What this means in human-speak is that, instead of programming by staring at a black screen full of green text, you can program by connecting pretty little boxes and, when they inevitably don’t do what you’d like them to do, you just unhook them and connect them to something else. Think about like the modular synthesizer of the programming world. And Max for Live extends this functionality by allowing Max to run inside of Ableton as a Device, the format that we are all so fond of.

For many true-blue geeks, like myself, this is exciting simply because it is. Game of Thrones isn’t on Netflix, so what else am I going to do?

But for the novice, you might need some convincin’. So here’s why I think learning Max for Live is worth your time.

Extend MIDI Controllers with Max for Live

This is one of the principal benefits of Max for Live: you can convert the button presses that come from your MIDI controller and make them mean whatever you want. To me, this means an end to the forest of intermediate “apps” that lie between your MIDI controller and Ableton. Remember having to open a whole different application to turn a button on your MPD from “Toggle” mode to “Note”? No more. You can even invent new “meanings” for MIDI actions. One good one might be to have different results when you press a MIDI note once, twice, or three times quickly. Since MIDI is just numbers, a lot of this is just going to be simple math.

Ableton Control with Max for Live

There’s also times when we are struggling to implement a very specific control scenario in Live and there’s just no clean way to do it. Let’s say I want to be able to have a Clip’s play position be dependent on the parameters of my Overdrive effect. Lesser Abletonians would take to the forum and start cursing the Germans for not implementing this CRUCIAL feature. But we, enlightened Max users, can whip up a custom patch using the Live API. And now, there’s no reason to curse the Germans.

And my favorite…

Learn Something

Some of us understand everything that is happening under the hood of Live. Some of us have no idea and, frankly, don’t care. But the majority of us have a lot of half-baked ideas about what what’s happening (I think it has something to do with…algorithms?). For those of us in this vast middle, learning how to use Max can be a great learning experience whose fruits extend far beyond just Ableton. Because in that little box (where you make Max patches), you can’t hide. You actually have to understand the different parts of a MIDI signal and you have to realize what happens when an audio sample plays back. Making even simple Max patches will help you crystalize what you know and figure out what you don’t. And since it’s done with picture, even us illiterates can learn a thing or two!

I am going to be posting the inaugural Max for Live video on Saturday, so be sure to watch out for that. I don’t like to post on Saturdays, but I’m too excited to wait!

If you have specific questions about Max for Live, make sure to put em in the comments!

But getting a consistent live setup for my generative sets has been tough, since it has to fulfill two criteria: Maximum control over musically pertinent parameters and enough randomness to make new things possible. It also must be optimized for radness. But after months and months in the lab (my bedroom), I’ve been able to whittle the setup down to what I demonstrate in this video.

I’m really happy to share this with y’all because it incorporates several different MIDI FX and demonstrates some cool routing techniques. It also employs a technique that I explored here. Enjoy!

Make sure to let me know in the comments if you have any questions!

To understand why we’d want to do that, it might first be important to remember what Compression does. It allows you to raise the perceived volume of a signal because it attenuates the volume spikes that might cause distortion. With compression, you can raise the average volume of a signal, but often at the expense of dynamics, since the distance between the quiet and the loud sections of the signal will be closer together.

One way that we can have our cake and compress it, too, is to apply more compression to areas of the signal that may not have that much dynamic variation, such as a kick drum. Usually a kick drum is playing or not. There’s very seldom a reason, in electronic music, to have quieter and louder hits of the kick drum. So, squashing this frequency range and leaving the rest untouched, will allow you to raise the perceived volume of these parts without sacrificing the overall dynamics of the track.

In this little video, I show you how to do just that. I also illustrate (unwittingly!) some common missteps when applying this kind of compression, so be sure to look out for these and not to fall in the same traps that I do!

But I also think that you should do what you can with what you’ve got.

That is why I think that you should always check your mix (several times in fact) on a wide variety of speakers. This way, you can cross reference how the mix sounds in a variety of environments and make sure that you tailor your mix accordingly. Here’s where I check my mixes:

On my good headphones (Grados)
On my monitors
On my crappy iPhone headphones
In my car (great system)
In my roommate’s car (crap system)
On a boombox
On a club PA (I usually do this when a project is close to done)

For every one of these, I take notes. I write down which instruments are too prominent and instruments are getting “swallowed.” Then, I compare these notes with one another. If I see the same problems arising on multiple systems, then I assume that it is a problem with the mix and I correct accordingly.

While this may seem janky, I have it on good authority that even the best sound engineers will eventually listen to a mix on a crappy boombox. The reason behind this is simple: only .05% of the population will ever listen to your track on anything resembling a hi-fi system. Most of us mere mortals will listen to it on a laptop at best and, at worst, on iPhone speakers. Even the most clubby of music now has to be able to be listened to in these different environments. So, take heart! You are just doing some field testing.

You scientist, you.

Leave a comment and tell me where your going to check your mixes! Extra points for bizarro answers.

As I’m sure all of you Ableton fanatics have heard, Ableton and Soundcloud are totally into one another. Owners of Ableton are eligible for a Free Soundcloud Pro account (for 5 months) and Soundcloud users are eligible for Live Lite, which previously only came with the Justin Bieber Paper Jamz Keytar. So, we’re stoked, right?

But, to be honest, I’m not that stoked. Frankly, if I wanted a Soundcloud Pro account, I would have one already. And I don’t really have the need to upload 36 hours of music (I’m not Sigur Ros). My greatest hope is that the Soundcloud deal will bring in some more Ableton newbs who will be below us on the great Ableton chain of being, thus giving the people on the Ableton Forum more people to abuse. j/k. I really do hope that it will bring in more people who want to learn about music production. The more, the merrier!

I’m really interested, though, in the “Publish to Soundcloud” capability that the new Ableton update apparently has (I’m superstitious and NEVER update my Ableton immediately). Do you guys think that that was a key feature to add? Will it change your workflow? YOUR LIFE?

Let me know in ye olde comments.