Music • Sound • Video • Art

MaxForLive is the fusion of Ableton’s Live DAW and Cycling74′s Max visual programming tool. With the two, you can create plugins that bring new capabilities to LIVE8. You can also share these plugins with others. Ableton hopes to create an active MaxForLive community with a rich set of ever new and changing plugins. (Think Native Instrument’s Reaktor5 communities and you’ll get the concept.) Well these things are starting to trickle in.

Here is a potential game changer. A device that renders knowledge of music theory ‘optional’. Watch the whole thing. (Takes about 10 minutes). Seriously, take the time. The end features the guy jamming real time with a long time jazz pianist and DOING QUITE WELL despite the fact that he doesn’t understand “notes, chords, and all that stuff.”

So, is this the continued democratization of music or the further “dumbing down” of musical knowledge? Fascinating.

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Edit – 12/22/09: There is a really lively discussion / debate / argument going on over at the LIVE forum on the merits (or lack thereof) of this MaxForLive patch. Check it out here.

“Practice.”

It’s an old joke, but one that has some truth to it.

After 20+ years with various and sundry keyboards, I finally took the plunge a couple of years ago and started taking formal piano instruction. (If you are interested in music instruction and you live in the DC-MD-VA area, you really owe it to yourself to check out the Levine Music School.) I had always been a proponent of avoiding the “straightjacket of orthodoxy” and discovering music creation on my own or in collaboration with like-minded individuals. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is easier to break the rules if you first know them. And besides, for my personal interests, some of the rules are helpful!

My focus is really on developing my finger dexterity so as to make it easier to write pieces at the piano with more spontaneity. I also am trying to develop a much more formal understanding of theory and harmony as I have aspirations to one day work with film.

But you got to start somewhere, and if you want to also, then Hanon, Hanon Revisited, and Beyer should be your new friends.

The issue of course is finding the time. Between family, the day job, stuff for the blog, and (let’s not forget) my latest project tracks*, I’ve got to find the time to practice. Requires a purposefulness that is … well … more intense.