Want to take Live to the next level? RA's Mark Strauss outlines the infinite possibilities connected to Ableton and Cycling '74's Max for Live.

Computer programming as music, or music as music?

yes because we all know that hardware requires no programming whatsoever

it's just a tool, one of many, for making sound

i doubt a concert pianist thinks that syncing a couple of boxes and a synthesizer together with some midi and playing a few live 7th and 9th chords over the top is music either, you know?

ignorance is blissssssssss

Does hardware require programming? I guess if you want it to. I'm not even 100% against programming music, step sequencers, arpeggiators, analog sequencers, etc are all cool tools to use. Generally, even those require some musical knowledge to use. Music that requires absolutely no musical knowledge is going to be pretty limited in usefulness to me. Basing an entire method of working on that limited premise is generally not a good look.

With an MPC and a keyboard, you can be very musical. Turn quantization off and play your own rhythms, your own chord progressions, your own melodies and harmonies. It's not that different from recording a live performance aside from the fact that you can use MIDI to allow an additional playback to capture another "performance" of tweaking out the sounds or doing a dub style mixdown.

I don't think it's entirely correct to assume that anyone that uses tools like Max for making music doesn't possess any musical knowledge.

It's always funny to see arguing about methods of composing electronic music. It's all just computers. Some are just very specialized and perhaps only perform a single task, but you're still programming a computer, i.e. giving a computer special instructions on how to perform a task.

Thinking one method is more musical than the other is in my eyes entirely irrelevant, as long as the result is interesting. To me, the end result doesn't necessarily need to be "musical" in any traditional sense, as long as it sounds good.

Great new possibilities, love the ¨tool¨.

mmmmm cant wait

Very cool!

thanks. that one encourages me to pay more attention on that end.

Another forum topic notified RA forum users that Max 6 has been announced....expect some growth on M4L to reflect the new version's features but remember that having the full blown version of Max is where the "infinity" begins so keep this in mind. Max4Live is great but you can do so much more with the full version so watch-out.