Max for Live · MIDI effect
Like a soundtracker — inside Ableton Live.
The grid, the speed, the feel of the trackers that built demoscene and game music, fully integrated into Live. Type MIDI as fast as you can type, shake a pattern up with one keystroke, and drive eight instruments anywhere in your Set from a single window.
* Price excluding tax — VAT or sales tax for your country is added by Gumroad at checkout. Lifetime licence, every 1.x update free.
Download the free edition — 4 channels, 16 rows, one tracker per Set, no Receiver
On video
See it typed.
A pattern filling up, the eight channels each leaving for their own track, a block redrawn at random, and the export to a Live clip. Shorter to watch than this paragraph was to write. Beside it, what 1.1 adds: the Generate panel and the seven themes.
Why a tracker
The piano roll draws. A tracker flies.
Trackers were born on the Amiga in the late 1980s, carried a whole era of game music and demoscene, and never really went away. The principle fits in one sentence: time runs down. Each row is an instant, each column a channel — you read a whole bar in a second and write it from the keyboard, at typing speed, with the mouse still there for what it does better: landing anywhere in one click, grabbing a block you can see.
Type, don't draw
Notes are keys, laid out like a piano over two rows, exactly as in FastTracker II. A held key fills a column on its own.
Everything at once
Up to 64 rows and 8 channels are on screen together. No horizontal scrolling, no zoom level to negotiate, no clip to open.
Numbers you can read
A velocity is a number. So is a length, a delay, a repeat spacing. Read it, retype it, move on — everything is decimal, nothing is hexadecimal any more.
Commands, not gestures
Arpeggios, stutters, glissandi, mid-pattern speed changes and jumps: things a piano roll expresses badly, written in four characters.
What it does best
Eight channels. Eight instruments. One window.
Put a small companion device — the MaxTracker Receiver — in front of each instrument you want to drive, and one grid pilots as many tracks of the Set as you like. Live instruments, VST plugins, each with its own effects, its own volume, its own track.
Write the drums on channel 1, the bass on 2, a pad on 3. Nothing to route in Live, nothing to set in preferences: the devices find each other.
- Any track, any instrument. Live devices and VST plugins alike.
- No perceptible delay. Measured at 0.0 ms average across 2,250 events.
- Several receivers may share a channel — double a bass line on two instruments in one click.
- Mute and solo from the grid act on the whole Set, without touching Live's own track controls.
- One button per track exports that receiver's channels into a clip on its own track.
Stuck? Roll the dice
A MIDI generator that stays musical.
Select a block, press Shift+R, listen. Again. The Generate panel holds the four ways of stirring a block — Random, Re-pitch, Shuffle, Permute — and every one of them was tuned to hand you something playable rather than noise.
- It knows your scale. Live 12 keeps the song's root and intervals; the draw reads them and moves any stray note to the nearest one that fits. Twelve random semitones never sound good — five notes of a pentatonic almost always do.
- Keep your notes, redraw the rest. Switch the NOTE column off, select the channel, press Shift+R: lengths, velocities and effects are redrawn while your notes stay exactly where you put them. Switch the column back on and everything returns.
- It favours the beats. Rows landing on a beat get the full density, the others its square. That is the difference between a phrase and a hedge.
- It never writes nonsense. Never a velocity without a note, never a glissando step wider than the interval it has to cross, never a command that would sit there doing nothing.
- Shuffle or permute. Shuffle redistributes every row; Permute trades only the rows that carry a note, so the groove stays put and the notes move. Either way, the same material in another order, chords intact.
- Re-pitch. Every note is given another pitch and keeps its place, its length, its velocity and its command: the rhythm does not move an inch.
- Reroll one value with nothing selected: the draw lands on the single field under the cursor.
In the box
Small device, whole workflow.
The grid
Up to 64 rows × 8 channels, in a resizable floating window that carries the name of its Live track. Font size and line height are yours to set.
Seven effect commands
Arpeggio, channel velocity, delay, speed, jump, repeat and glissando — a letter and three decimal digits, each digit its own selectable field.
Tick-exact export
EXPORT writes the pattern into the selected clip slot through the Live API, not through MIDI. Positions and durations are exact; there is nothing to quantise.
Record from a controller
A MIDI keyboard writes into the pattern with real note-offs, so phrasing is kept. The device is fully transparent: CC, pitchbend and aftertouch pass through untouched.
A randomiser worth using
The draw follows the Set's scale, favours the beats, never invents a dead command and never writes a value a command could not use. The Generate panel holds the four modes: Random, Re-pitch, Shuffle and Permute.
Saved with the Set
The pattern is a device parameter: it travels with your Live Set, duplicates with the track, and needs no file beside the device. To carry a groove from one piece to another, save a device preset — a complete snapshot, pattern and settings alike.
Look inside
The device, the window, the workflow.
Four views that say more than a paragraph.
Accuracy
The clip sounds like the pattern.
Recording a Max for Live device in real time hands its notes to Live's MIDI stream, which timestamps every note-on and every note-off at the next audio buffer boundary — and rounds them independently. Durations drift by a buffer from one note to the next.
EXPORT does not take that road. It writes into the clip through the Live API, at the tick. Speed changes shift the rows that follow them, jumps are unrolled along the path actually taken, delays are honoured, arpeggios and repeats become the notes you hear. The clip length follows from that path — it is not computed.
This is also why the manual documents its own limits rather than hiding them: what is discrete exports, what is continuous plays but is not written. That line is drawn openly, and everything else is on the exact side of it.
At a glance
Specifications
- Type
- Max for Live MIDI effect (.amxd)
- Host
- Ableton Live 12.2 or newer, with Max for Live
- Systems
- Windows and macOS, identical behaviour
- Pattern
- 4 to 64 rows, 1 to 8 channels
- Resolution
- 24 ticks per beat; row speeds from 1/1 to 1/96
- Columns
- NOTE, LEN, VEL and a four-field FX column
- Commands
- A arpeggio · V velocity · D delay · S speed · J jump · R repeat · G glissando
- Export
- To a Live clip slot, tick-exact, whole pattern or one channel
- Included
- MaxTracker, MaxTracker Receiver, manual
- Licence
- Lifetime licence, per user, free 1.x updates
- Undo
- Ten steps, the device's own — notes, effects, settings, channel names and mutes
The project moves with you
Got an idea? Send it.
MaxTracker is written by one person, and what gets built next is shaped by what users ask for — more than one command in the current version started life as an email. Tell us what is missing, what gets in your way, what you would write if the grid let you. Every message is read, and answered by the person who wrote the code.
Boost your writing with a MIDI generator unlike the others.
Both devices, the manual, and every 1.x update along the way.
* Price excluding tax. Any VAT or sales tax due in your country is added by Gumroad at checkout.