i never had much interest in the annual namm music trade show, but yesterday i was glued to cdm's twitter feed for a minute-by-minute update. i blame native instruments, who had me bursting with curiosity about their 3 new products. luckily, i didn't have to add any of those to my wishlist. i can see the fun of maschine, but mpc style programming just doesn't fit the way i make music right now. what got me excited though, was all of ableton's news.

if you want to see what's new at ableton, just visit their website and watch the 4 movies. let me highlight a few things that i personally like.

first off are the changes in live8. to me, the new multiple parameter editing is pretty essential. i miss that function every day in live7. being able to group tracks is also very welcome. live is not great for mixing, mainly because it gets cluttered pretty quickly. so grouping really helps. i just hope they also added color coding of tracks.

the library is supposedly having a, much needed, total overhaul. the current organization is quite unclear, and for me it's always hard to find something useful fast. fingers crossed.

the collision instrument and the new fx are nice additions too. being a big fan of resonators, i can't wait to try corpus. the vocoder might not deliver the sound of something like eiosis' vocoder, but setting it up is probably a lot easier. sometimes quick and dirty is just what you need. finally, the looper might inspire me to play my bass guitar a bit more.

as when live6 got updated to live7, there are probably also tons of small improvements that you can't live without once you've used them. i can tell already you there is a live8 suite update with my name on it.

on a community level, enabling the easy sharing of ableton projects could be a big step forward. collaborating with people far away usually boiled down to sending dvds or rendering stuff you don't really want to render. i've done a few collaborations like these recently, and i'm really curious to see how well this works.

then there's the new the akai apc40 midi controller. jointly developed by ableton and akai, it might be exactly what i'm looking for. i've set up my live performance so that i don't have to look at my laptop's screen. right now, i use 2 behringer bcr-2000s and a peavey pc-1600x to control ableton.

with the screen invisible, getting proper visual feedback is everything. i really went to the limits of my controllers, but still i can only control ableton in a pretty crude way due to the limited visual feedback. i expect the apc40 to fare a lot better in this respect. i would probably need 2 though, due to how i've organized my live set.

but the biggest news for me has got to be max for live. although ableton is my main host, i also like to use stuff like supercollider, max/msp, plogue bidule and audiomulch. usually, connectivity is the problem. rewire is an option, as is something like jack on osx. but to me, it never feels really integrated. more time is spend on getting it to work than making music. plogue did a great thing by making bidule available as a vst plugin. and i hope audiomulch will do the same in their upcoming 2.0 update.

but as far as integration goes, max for live is about as good as it gets. i was expecting a lot of the cycling74/ableton partnership, and this is a dream come true. it will be possible to build your own instruments, audio fx and midi fx, with all parameters readily available for automation.

also expect the internet to be flooded with thousands of free devices. there will be tons of “hi, this is my first analog synth”, but also a lot of exotic stuff for which the max community has a penchant. i'm curious to learn how much of max/msp will be in max for live. will fft be in? will you be able to load max/msp patches? will you be able to send audio from one device to another?

i'm sure there will be some caveats, but right now this seems a great first step towards turning ableton live into a modular host. and that's exactly where i wanted it to go.