James Holden has open sourced his crazy Max environment, “Benny”, which he uses to make his music and play live. I’ve not really tried it in any depth yet but incredibly impressive stuff!
https://playbenny.github.io/benny_manual/
25 Likes
epic isn’t it? also free to download and doesn’t require owning max to run.
www.playbenny.com
https://playbenny.github.io/benny_manual/installation/
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Fuuuuuuuuuuck this is awesome
I can’t try it these days, but I’m so excited about it !!
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Wtf? Between this and Blockhead we’re really living in the golden age of the DIY DAW
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And a good advice is always welcome.
Live set pro-tip: To prevent crashes, tape your usb cables into the ports, at both ends, every time.
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A video from 2025 Crux Festival where James explains Benny and his reasons behind it. Great video and person.
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Not even a year of open sourced, and the changelog is impressive.
3/6/25:
- utility.spectrum block added - outputs a test tone, shows the spectrum of its input in a pop up window.
28/5/25:
- important: **breaking change** if you already had a launch control xl, or midi fighter twister configured you should remove it from your hardware profile(s) and re-add. this will make it use the new midi controller drivers written specially for these controllers.
- hardware manager now supports readymade configurations for common controllers. if benny recognises a controller when you add it in hardware manager the settings will be autofilled and you'll be notified.
- monome arc support, including displaying both the type of the control (eg unipolar, bipolar, stepped menu item) and the individual voice parameter values for polyphonic blocks.
- improved controller ui, colour assignments and storing initial values are easier with the new edit mode
- end zone forces : for controllers with encoders or motorised controls, you can specify zones at either end of the range that either attract or repel. this is useful for example when mapping to delay feedback controls, which are nice to turn up for a moment but bad if you forget and leave them there too long.
- smart jumpless soft pickup implemented for controllers with potentiometer outputs. you can disable this in the preferences. smart soft pickup remaps the fader curve to take into account differences between the controller position and the actual value. this means there are no jumps, no dead zones, and increasing the fader value always increases the output value (and the converse).
- controller looper. there's a button in the ui marked loop, or you can assign a midi button. while held, it captures all controller moves, when released it loops them - the loop length is set by the duration of the press. if you just tap the button it loops the preceding bar. moving any of the looped controls again stops the loop. once you have something looped you can click the 'grab' button to turn that loop into a permanent copy in a new piano roll player block. thanks to j preiksa for the suggestion!
- the keyboard looper has been improved to match the controller one, though the short-tap default loop is 8 bars, and you can adjust the loop capture range in the keyboard block before spawning a piano roll block if you want. both loopers copy a bit of performance prior to the loop into the piano roll when you spawn it, in case the previous take was better.
- improved piano roll ui - you can click to open / fold lanes, and the automatic focus only expands used lanes.
- on the panels page, if a block has patterns and the pattern selector is assigned to its panel then it displays pattern trigger buttons - one button per available non-empty pattern.
04/05/25:
- on windows, when using MME drivers, if an audio device (eg bluetooth headphones) disconnects then the max scheduler stops and as a result benny's ui stops too. this is a max/windows issue that i can't fix, but as a workaround if it happens you can scroll down on the launcher window and there's now an emergency save button which will save the contents of your song even if the ui and/or max scheduler have stopped.
28/4/25:
- improved the feel of the state fade sliders - you can make them pop up by dragging the state buttons in the left bar.
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Love this one
15/03/25:
on startup the tempo is set to a random value to protect users from accidentally starting a song at 120bpm.
13 Likes
such an impressive artist
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Quite reminiscent of Sensomusic Usine.
