I’ve never looked into this specific functionality, and generally you wouldn’t unless you’re a hardware vendor working with Ableton.Īs of Live 6, though, there’s a hack provided for everything else, called MIDI Remote Scripts. I’m just giving you everything you could possibly want to know about the nanoSERIES and MIDI Remote Scripting! Introducing MIDI Remote ScriptsĪbleton Live uses compiled Python scripts to provide custom support for controllers, as I understand it. This is a long article but a relatively short and easy process. I’ve tested only the full version of Live on Mac and Windows, though I think at least some of the “lighter” versions should work, as well.

Required for this tutorial: Ableton Live 6.x or later. The upshot: you get simple “automap” functionality without something specific like Automap (or drivers, in general).Ĭaught blue-handed: dynamic control of any device means never having to open a template. But you could take any hardware and apply the same technique - even something you’ve built yourself - so long as it sends simple MIDI messages. They’re a likely candidate, at about US$60 street each and with some handy controls (kontrols?) for mixer channels and drum racks. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s such an easy hack that it’s worth at least exploring.įor this tutorial, I’ll take the example of the Korg nanoKONTROL and nanoPAD. It’s been available since Live 6, but it seems not many people know that it’s there or how to use it. If you’ve used one of these products, you’ve no doubt been able to click a device rack in Live and have a blue hand icon appear in the title bar, automatically assigning, say, the first eight macro knobs in a drum rack to your eight hardware encoders.īut what if you have hardware that isn’t covered by this functionality that you want to use? The easiest solution is something called MIDI Remote Scripting. So it’s great that many control surfaces will behave intelligently out of the box with Ableton Live, including devices like the Akai APC40 and Novation ReMOTE SL. When software has “Live” as its name, you know control will be everything.

A handsome shot of the Korg nanoSERIES pad and controller makes them look pricier than they are.

How to write midi remote scripts