Messing with sends in Ableton involves too many dropdown menus. Sometimes I want things to be in serial, other times in parallel, and I want to be able to quickly change the order of things without adjusting half a dozen menus each time. Would rather have button presses and knob turns to get the job done. Trying to avoid maintaining multiple Live sets for different purposes, as I find it works better for me to continuously evolve my default set. But this means it needs to be super easy to reconfigure on the fly depending on what I’m trying to do.
I’m starting to imagine a Max For Live matrix mixer for more a immediate and tactile routing experience.
Does such a thing already exist, or should I start making it?
Ive been playing with messing with the routing IO in M4L for a while now …
(though mainly for midi/sampling, rather than sends)
basically, I have midi tracks for my controllers, which feed into instrument tracks, and then into ‘sampler’ tracks… then I just switch the I/O routings to say whats going where.
Ive mainly been doing this because for MPE , I need to have multiple midi tracks for an individual controller… I then created a M4L object which makes this easier, by ‘mirroring’ track 1, to track 2…N just changing channels numbers.
this recently became much better, since Ableton have now made routing I/O available on the push
theres a few reasons I use, routing IO, but main one is efficiency/latency. I dont really want to introduce M4L processing on audio/midi unless it really wants to transform the audio/midi.
… fortunately the routing I/O is accessible via M4L so you can alter this from M4L (which is what I did on my MPE M4L object, basically a bunch of track observers, triggering routing changes)
I’ve actually built something very similar to what you’re describing, using an 8x8 monome grid as a matrix router, but for MIDI rather than audio:
The only issue I think you might run into is that Max’s send~ and receive~ objects don’t work within Max4Live. If you can find a way around that, though, then the basic architecture I’ve used (routing between the different m4l devices on the fly) should be reuseable for the sort of thing you’re after!
Various instruments on tracks, various effects on sends.
Probably the least effort way to achieve what I want is to combine effects in different ways on different sends, and just use the send levels to pick and choose.
Reflecting on it a little more, it’s not so much that I want a matrix mixer, as I want to be able to patch routes in various ways. You can simulate this with the output menus, but it’s fiddly. I guess I could get what I want if I just use Reaktor or Max for effects and patch in there.
It’s funny, this “last mile” bit of ergonomic optimization is always tough to describe, let alone design for. Sometimes you don’t quite know what you want so much as what is irritating you. It’s just “not this”.
I would definitely look into clyphx. You store commands in clip titles. You can access most of the functions live has. Not positive it would be what you want but one thing you could do is store detailed routing presets in clips. It also comes with macro-bat which allows some extended functions for racks.
interested in what others are using ClyphX for. I just picked up the pro version last night and it seems great so far. a lot of tedious operations are streamlined. kind of wish this kind of thing would get picked up and baked into ableton.
