Ableton Max for Live

Musical innovators have always sought new ways of making unique, personal sounds. Today's most creative computer musicians are pushing the boundaries with Max for Live, turning Ableton Live into their own customized instrument.

Max for Live is a tool kit for building new devices for Ableton Live. Offering unlimited customization potential, Max for Live is backed by an inspired community who share their creations. Check out some of our favorite devices and the people behind them.

What Comes With Max for Live

Check out the comprehensive collection of devices that come with Max for Live, including common requests such as LFOs, step sequencers, envelope followers, multichannel routing tools and more.

Build Your own Devices

Learn more about the unlimited customization potential of Max for Live.

maxforlive.com

Explore an ever-expanding library of community-created Max for Live devices.

Ableton Max for Live puts the power and potential of Max/MSP inside Live. Create all the instruments, effects and extensions you've ever wanted.Go beyond the common and predictable, and transcend the limits that conventional tools impose. Build completely unique synths and effects, create algorithmic composition tools, or fuse Live and controller hardware into radical, new music machines. Join a society of makers and share ingenuity.
What it is

Basically, Max for Live is a tool kit for making new devices. Think of a diverse and comprehensive set of building blocks that you can use to build pretty much anything you can think of. These building blocks include basic objects such as "+", audio elements such as filters and oscillators, user interface objects, and a set of objects that regulate access to Live and hardware devices. Max for Live also provides a canvas where you can place and connect these objects with virtual wires. Flowing through these wires are audio, MIDI or video signals, or any other kind of data. Ableton Max for Live is essentially a visual programming environment where you build courses or tracks for these signals to run through.

You can build new devices from scratch, modify existing ones or simply use devices that others have made. Max for Live includes several ingenious example devices and plenty of tutorials to take you from using to tweaking, and then to building.