From the course: Learning Max for Ableton Live

Intro to interface building in Max - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Learning Max for Ableton Live

Start my 1-month free trial

Intro to interface building in Max

- [Instructor] Without a user interface the patch will be one big, empty patch where we can't really control anything. So let's explore how we can build a graphical interface over a patch and then test it in Live later on. In Max you have many ways to add graphic elements to your patch and they're all available at the top of the Max interface. So like we explored before you have the buttons here, you have numbers, sliders here, and then some other stuff that you can use as well. But what we're going to do since this is a Max for Live we're going to use the interface that comes from Live. And this is the button that we have right here. So we have a Live button, we have a dial grid, and a whole bunch of other stuff like we've used the decibel volume slider and monitor right here. So if we were to go into presentation mode right now the only thing that would show is our volume. So the way to do that, and we're going to do that quite a bit as we add knobs and things like that into our interface is by clicking the presentation mode right here. So if you click that you're going to see whatever are the graphical interface stuff. But one thing that may happen, and right now it's happening, if you click on presentation mode and something that's supposed to show in your presentation mode, doesn't show, so for example, our volume doesn't show click on the actual object in question and go into the inspector. And what you're going to do is in the layout tab you're going to see, "include in presentation." So by clicking on that like so, once you click presentation now it's going to show in the presentation mode right here. So what we need to do at this point is position the volume where we want it in our patch, because remember that line determines what we're going to see inside of our patch. So if I keep the volume below and save, and then go back to Live, you're going to see that nothing shows up in our patch. So if I go back to Max, put the volume in here like so and then make sure you save and then go back to Live. Now you're going to see the volume inside of your patch. So these are all the small details that sometimes can be confusing or sometimes can be working against you, you want to make sure that you always have the presentation mode to see what is going to show in your patch inside of Live. You want to make sure also in the layout that the object that you're clicking on is actually included in the presentation. And if you've done all this and it's not working it's not showing in your patch, what you want to do is make sure that you click out of any objects, get out of presentation mode, and click on patcher inspector, go to basic and then make sure that you have open in presentation, crosschecked. So now that we have all these details done let's start adding some knobs in here. So what I'm going to do is start adding a knob like so, by clicking like that, put that knob in here, and this knob is going to control the triangular oscillator right here. So let's push that out a little bit, put the knob connect it to our input of our multi-channel here. And then what we could do is change the names so scripting name, let's change this to, Tri. And the fact that we're changing the name like this it's going to give us a better representation of what that particular knob is, like so. Okay, so we're going to do the exact same thing but this time we're going to do option click, like so, create a second one and that's for our Saw oscillator connected to this multi-channel and then change this to Saw. And I'm changing all the names on my end because I want to make sure that you guys are doing so as well. Okay, so now we're going to create the knobs for the ADSR, but because it's more the same, I'm going to do them very quickly and you can basically copy the pace and connect them to all the four dots at the top of the ADSR object. Okay, so now let's change the names of each of these ones, just to make sure we have the right. So first is attack. So let's go ahead and change that. Attack. Attack. And while we're here there's something else that we need to change. And this is really important because it's going to determine the levels that you're going to use or the range that you're going to use as you play with this level here or this knob. And this is in the range here and what is the value that we're using for that fiscal or button? So the first thing we're going to do is make sure that for the Attack, we have a range of value that is equal to what would like. So remember we added a few numbers here so let's go ahead and change that number for that knob. So I'm going to start at zero and I'm going to go all the way up to 2000. like so. And it's going to be a time in milli seconds. So that's going to make a huge difference because ADSR is based on time. So you want to make sure that you change the right values in here. Okay, so to let's go to the second one. So the next one is Decay, Decay, Decay. And then again, we're going to do zero to 2000 and this is again in milli seconds. Now we're going to do Sustain, and Sustain is a little bit different is the only one that is not using the same things. So Sustain is going to be a percentage as opposed to time. Like that. So you want to make sure that you're using the right unit based on the buttons or the objects that you're using. Okay, so Sustain, the levels for this one are zero to one because it's a percentage. So zero, one. And the last one is, Release. Release, and I'm simply copying and pasting from my first one, again in milli seconds. And we're going to do again zero to 2000. So now we've actually changed the buttons here for our ADSR. Now we need to make some changes to the Tri and the Saw. Very much the same way that we just did for the other ones here. So if we look at Tri, what we need is a float number, and a zero to one. So we're either using it or not. So zero to one, we're going to do the same here, float, zero, to one. Okay, so now that we have our knobs completed, let's move on.

Contents