- If you've never heard of Max for Live, chances are you're going to have little interest in the rest of this review. However, if you're the curious type, let me at least give you some background information to help you along the way. Max for Live is a collaboration between Cycling '74 and Ableton that ties Max/MSP (an audio and MIDI patching/development environment written by Cycling '74) and Ableton Live. Essentially what it provides is a tool where end-users can create entirely new instruments, audio effects and MIDI effects for use in Ableton Live. Once created, these devices can be shared with any other Max for Live owner to use and edit/enhance as they see fit. A short time after Max for Live was released in 2009, maxforlive.com was created by users who wanted a common place to share and rate the devices they'd created.
If you wanted to share your device, you simply uploaded it to maxforlive.com and it was instantly available to all Max for Live users for free. Up until recently, these free patches created by end-users represented the only option available to people looking for new devices. That all changed a few months ago when the sample-bank specialists from Puremagnetik enlisted the help of Max developer Dave Linnenbank to create the first commercial pack of Max for Live devices called Max Fuel, the First—available on their website for $38. So how would the open-source community of Max developers handle the shake-up of the first for-profit Max for Live product? Are they worth the money?
The first thing to discuss is the dilemma of Max for Live creators who want to sell their devices. By default, any Max for Live device can be "opened up" into a patching mode that displays the inner workings of the device, navigable all the way down to the lowest level Max objects. This results in a de-facto open-source system in which a developer would have a very hard time guarding the intellectual property of a device they'd created. Puremagnetik figured out a workaround to this in the form of a clever hack which hides the patching view immediately after it is opened. This technique effectively protects their devices from being adapted and resold, but at the same time it has ruffled quite a few feathers in the Max for Live community. A quick read through the comments on this Create Digital Music post will give you an idea of how it was received by some.
Max Fuel, the First comes packed with ten devices—two instruments (Stick and Bump), five audio effects (Drop, Jumble, Marx, Veer and Yell), and three control devices (el Effo, Multiplexd and sidechainer). Starting off the two instrument options is Bump, a mono synth with a combo filter / delay feedback section. Any instrument created in Max is an interesting concept, but the synthesis controls found on Bump are extremely limited—and as such the result is an extremely limited sound. Stick, on the other hand, is a percussion-style instrument based around FM synthesis that provides more sonic possibilities, but still feels quite thin on its own. All-in-all, the instruments represent the low point of the Max Fuel bundles—they feel more like proof-of-concepts than legitimate instruments, but it's hard to expect much more for the price of admission.
Things get more useful when you begin to look at the five different audio effects. Drop, Yell and Marx are three interesting devices which all split the incoming audio signal into sections (by loudness bands in Marx and by filter frequency in the other two) and let you operate on those sections independently. Drop allows you to control the probability that each of the four filtered bands will be muted each time the effect is triggered—sort of like a gater that leaves things up to chance. Yell on the other hand takes those four filtered bands and applies a nicely controllable distortion to each. Marx trades the filters for loudness thresholds and lets you take three adjustable loudness ranges and alter the relative volume of each (for example taking the quietest part of an audio signal and pushing it forward).
Although the thought of changing the volume of bands already segmented by volume may do your head in, it can result in some fascinating sound transformations when pushed. This kind of geeky spectral processing feels right at home in Max for Live, and refined devices like these are good examples of what is possible in the environment. The audio effect group is rounded out by less noteworthy additions Jumble and Veer, the latter of which has controls that directly reference the DSP algorithm Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), a strange move that may cause some head scratching by the non-geeks out there.
The last of the devices included in Max Fuel can be categorized as control devices, but they can loosely be thought of as MIDI effects. The first one of these is called el Effo, and by reading the name out loud you should be able to tell what it's all about—a controllable LFO that can also act as a step sequencer for any parameter within Ableton Live (including VST device parameters). This fulfills the request of many Max for Live users who pined for a good LFO and does so admirably, but in practice el Effo is surprisingly taxing on the CPU. In testing, one instance of el Effo automating a macro control in Maschine took the CPU utilization percentage from 15% to 55%, which had me searching maxforlive.com for some alternatives. Moving on to the next control device, Side Chainer is a great little addition that allows you to control any other parameter based on the audio levels of any track in the current set. Great fun can be had by controlling the parameter of a device feeding Side Chainer by the audio coming into Side Chainer itself. So meta.
When it comes down to it, Max Fuel instills mixed feelings. Both sides of the open-source debate have their valid arguments. The community aspect has always been an essential part of Max, but at the same time it's difficult to give away work that required long hours of development (especially when this type of work is one's livelihood). When it comes down to it, there is a good portion of Max for Live users who will never design their own devices, who simply bought into the environment as a way to play with new experimental devices with tight Ableton integration. This is the kind of person for whom Max Fuel was designed. Puremagnetik have created an interesting bundle of devices here that is worth the price for any existing Max for Live user. I hope that as time passes more commercial developers take their example and get into the Max for Live game, as competition can only mean good things for users.
Ratings:
COST: 4/5
VERSATILITY: 4/5
BUILD: 3/5
EASE OF USE: 4/5