The most exciting add-on for Ableton Live this spring for me is actually not an Ableton Extension. It’s warpradius, a Max for Live device by Jon Doe One that transforms the entire grid into a single expressive percussion surface. It employs a Bessel membrane resonator model, a modal synthesis method that produces realistic, varied percussion sounds. And it’s free.
Jon has a detailed walkthrough. This requires Push 3 for a reason — it uses the strike position across each pad to merge the full 8×8 grid into a single continuous drum head. You still get light-up feedback based on where you tap on the grid, but Push 3’s MPE-equipped strike location gives you far greater granularity, since it reports not only which grid you’ve hit but exactly where in x,y position.
That said, it’s a Max patch, and the equally impressive work here is building a gen~ port of the Bessel functions. Bessel what? Well, Ersatz Ben has some prior art describing those. (Philip Meyer is credited for some influence on this gen~ version.)
All this means if you don’t have a Push 3 — or have some other controller you want to use — you could port the sound guts to another environment! Or do both, really. Bessel everywhere!
The drum synth in this example is free, too! Paste into Max from the linked pastebin.
Sequenced Bessel sounds great, too. Ben Johnson’s creation:
And Philip Meyer’s example, inspired by the above, with patch (and more great links in there):
By the way — this is actually one of my big concerns about AI coding tools. The exchange you see here between these three individuals really relied on them having built and understood the full patch and shared it in a way that was legible to others. It also involved having those exchanges between people. If too much of something is “vibe-coded” — implying you didn’t go line by line and review what was generated — you may well have something that is unreadable to other humans. Plus, you won’t have gone through the work of understanding each component of what produces sound, which in something like modal synthesis is sort of the whole purpose of the activity.
There are lots of ways of incorporating AI-assisted coding into a workflow, so I don’t want to be overly binary. The main point is that talking to other humans — building inspiration from other individuals — is something we should defend vigorously, whether or not you’re using AI as part of your process. Just as long as we do keep talking to one another about waht we’re doing, I think we’ll do fine.
Oh, and what about discussions I see online about Ableton Extensions rendering Max for Live obsolete? For now, Extensions don’t have access to live audio and MIDI input and output. And we’ve seen no indication of that being anywhere on a roadmap any time soon. So expect to see a lot more action in Max for Live, just like this.
Outside Ableton Live APIs, you can absolutely choose between using something like Max and using something like TypeScript (with, perhaps, WebAssembly). And people do. So it’s far, far from a zero-sum game between technologies.
Anyway — modal synthesis! Heck, yes.