Change Clip Color When Played

by Clint on May 11th 2012

For v2.5, I spent a ton of time on sound design with the analog modulars, recording clip after clip of cool sounds. I ended up with hundreds of clips in one massive Live set. To create the final tracks, I did a series of live recordings using an Akai APC40 where the clips were fired and live dub-inspired mixing/effecting techniques were used. I created this Max for Live device to change the color of a clip upon being played. This way I could easily ensure during the performance that no single clip would get fired twice. It was a way for me to be spontaneous yet not monotonous. (read more about this release and process)

It worked fine for me but the way it handles figuring out which clip to change the color of is a hack. The "Reset Red Box" button is sort of like a panic button. It lets you tell the device the red box is all the way up top and left (the default position) so it can know where it is as you move the box around.

When the red box gets to the bottom or right side, it collapses to be a smaller box, making it even more annoying to track in the patch. For that reason, when I use this device, I make a bunch of empty scenes at the bottom of my set, and some emtpy tracks to the right so that I never really hit the edges and the device always knows where it is to color the correct clip.

Makes no sense? I agree. Better way to do it? No doubt. I had so many requests for this after I mentioned it in my feature on Ableton.com that I decided to go ahead and post it anyway.

Download ChangeClipColorWhenPlayed 1.2 from maxforlive.com


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