Last year I went through a phase of interest in the grassroots movement of DIY control interfaces for software. One in particular caught my eye: the monome. The monome is basically a grid button interface that you can use to control things. People mostly use it for music, but i’ve seen it used for video, lighting, games, etc. All sorts of stuff. The beauty is that it’s infinitely flexible, only limited by your imagination and programming skill. Sadly, this is the same thing that killed it for me. The program used to control it primarily, is Max/MSP, though it does support other apps using OSC, it’s primary method of communication. Max is difficult, and expensive. You could run all sorts of patches built by the monome-ing community, but in the end, the things that you missed were things like a good save/recall system for presets, and all the hoops you jump through to get it up and running. I found myself messing with getting patches to work, rather than any actual music being made. That being said, it’s a great performance tool. I had the original 40h, then a 64, then a 128. In the end, I sold it because it just took too much time to do something useful, so it ended up being a really cool decoration in my office. My philosophy about gear is always that if it’s not getting used, it needs to go to someone that will, so I sold it to a nice fellow in California.

Now since then, Ableton has teamed up with Cycling ’74, makers of Max, and developed a Max4Live, that allows you to run Max patches right inside Live. This has been the tie in that everyone has been waiting for, and now has once again piqued my interest. I think this time i’d like to build one though. Here’s one of the original videos that sold me on it: