About Monomod

Monomod is a modular environment for plugin control and development for use with grid-based controllers in Max for Live. It began as a multi-color Monome experiment over two years ago. It was designed with live musical performance as its most important goal. It is currently still in development, and is being offered as beta, but is being used for both production and performance by its author (so you should, too!).

Monomodular is a host plugin, containing a basic framework for communicating with several types of hardware (currently Launchpad, Livid's Ohm64, and iPad via a custom interface built with TouchOSC) without the need for very much setup. It allows communication between the grid controller and up to 8 client patches directly from the surface of the controller. It gives basic functionality of navigating and displaying a Monome256 workspace, and provides the base functionality for quickly writing or converting new plugins to work with its format.

The client plugins that I have written are largely unpublished. Plinko is the most prominent: it is fully functional, and I have spent a good deal of time testing it. Tutorials can be found to the right. Expect several other generative style plugins in the near future, as well as some utilities that don't really exist anywhere else.

I have also ported some other authors' plugins for use with Monomod. Some are heavily modified, while others are largely unchanged from their original functionality. I have made it a point to completely encapsulate each patch so that it may be loaded and saved within the context of a Live set, and not need any external files or setup. In some cases this is challenging, due to the way the original patches were written as well as the nature of how m4l stores data. I think I've been successful.

Please feel free to comment on your own experience with the Monomod host and its associated plugins. I am interested in improving it for others, as well as making my framework available and accessible to others who may want to use it as a basis for writing their own plugins in m4l. Its a fairly simple framework, but provides the ability to add a lot of functionality and ease to the Monome standard (whatever that means).

My thanks go out to the MANY people in the Max/Ableton community who have assisted me and put up with me throughout the development of this project. I am making this work as public as possible to return what I can to the people who have taught me, and to try to strengthen the community as a whole. The more people that are able to learn this art, the more likely m4l is to become more than just a niche for people who already had a background in programming or MaxMSP. I'm afraid that my own documentation skills have been severely lacking, so this blog will be a chance to make up for some bad habits.