Technology has done a strange thing to musicians: it’s turned us all into, well, loners.
It didn’t used to be this way. Musicians on instruments ranging from folk ensembles to symphony orchestras are able to join up and keep time with one another. So why not do the same with tech?
Ableton’s new Link technology promises to allow musicians to jam easily. But it isn’t just for Ableton Live. Today, iOS support is officially launching, allowing you to jam with supported apps even without a desktop/laptop computer involved.
Above: The developers of triqtraq and Elastic Drums jamming in Berlin.
Ableton Link: https://www.ableton.com/de/link/
Elastic Drums: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/e…
triqtraq: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/t…
Fugue: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/f…
As of today, you can already begin working with a terrifically handful useful of apps, from Audiobus to Elastic Drums to KORG Gadget. You can use these with Ableton Live, if you have the latest Live beta, or leave the computer out of it entirely and get iPhones and iPads jamming together.
Many of these developers are in Germany, so we gathered together for the regular mobile music developer meetup I organize together along with Elastic Drum’s Oliver Greschke. The team from Ableton who built the tool work around the corner, and joined in, as well, led by Michaela Buergle, Link Product Owner (who showed off the tool in the Ableton Loop keynote in October). It was a rare event that mirrored the feeling of the library itself – developers mixing with other developers, users and developers meeting one another, Ableton and third parties alongside.
The most fun, though, was watching the developers of apps actually play with each other – all those hard hours of coding work paying off in actually playing. And, surprise – they’re damned good.
Let’s watch:
Elastic Drums: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/e…
triqtraq: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/t…
Fugue: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/f…
MoDrum: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/m…
BassLine: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/b…
Patterning: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/p…
Loopy: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/l…
Audiobus: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/a…
triqtraq – jam sequencer: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/t…
Elastic Drums: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/e…
Fugue Machine: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/f…
Loopy: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/l…
Audiobus: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/a…
Patterning: https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/app/p…
There are some important things to know about how this works:
- There’s no Link app. “Link” exists only as library. It’s really drop-in support for developers. (Right now, that’s only iOS developers.) So there’s no button on your iPhone or iPad that says “Link.” Those apps, and Live itself, will just gain the ability to sync to each other wirelessly.
- There’s no master clock. Anyone can speed up or slow down the tempo, and the others will follow. That makes any of you a potential ‘conductor.’ And just as importantly, since there isn’t a master, you don’t have trouble if people come or go – any device can hop in or hop out at any time.
- There’s not anything else like this on iOS. DIY solutions have done this sort of peer-to-peer sync in laptop orchestras – Link itself grew out of a research project. But there aren’t other sync tools with this functionality or this wireless performance, period; Link is the first readily-available environment shipping in commercial tools.
- You can still send this timing to your MIDI gear. We’ll have to follow up on this use case, but since all of these devices are making a peer-to-peer connection, you can take any one of them and output MIDI clock to hardware. (You’ll want your ‘legacy’ gear receiving, not sending.)
- Wireless doesn’t mean laggy any more. You might want to carry along your own router (very portable ones are available), but the wireless performance was far more responsive than wired performance in the past.
- We’re waiting for more desktop, too. Ableton haven’t made any announcements yet about support beyond Live and iOS, but technically, it’s possible for them to provide this same SDK for Windows and Mac (or other mobile platforms if there’s a reason to do so). I’d love to sync Traktor or Maschine with Live, for instance, at last, and the developers there live just across the river. Rest assured we’ll be haunting Ableton until that happens. But for now, iOS gives us a lot to play with – and because it’s mobile, it’s perfectly suited to impromptu wireless jamming.
And now not only is this available to iOS users, but developers can pick it up soon. That’s to say nothing of built-in support in Audiobus.
So watch for this list to grow: