Share and share alike

Max For Live can bundle patches down to fully self-contained files – ideal for sharing your devices with others, says Phelan: “We can share this device online – we could stick it on Dropbox, give it to our mates… Often it can be good fun to share your devices with collaborators.

“It’s a really good idea, when you save your patch, to freeze it. Use the snowflake icon at the bottom left. This sort of ‘bounces’ everything you need for the device to work on a second computer. Our device is quite simple, so there’s not a lot it needs for freezing, but you might build a device with graphic files in it, or wavetable oscillators – or have more complex stuff going on – so it’s a really good idea to freeze your device, then save it again. Once you’ve done that, you should be able to stick your device on a different workstation and it should just work.

“Freezing is a little bit like bouncing your mix in a way; a bit like committing everything to a final version, which you might be able to distribute.”