Monthly Meetup (July 13, 2021)

“Beyond the Code” is a section of the meetup where we are able to speak with key individuals in music tech about their journey and perspectives on audio development.

This month we welcome Gerhard Behles, co-founder and CEO of Ableton, one of the most exciting music tech companies within our industry.

The programs we use to make music have a lot of implicit decisions baked into them, especially in their graphical interfaces. Nestup began as a thought experiment—we were trying to see if embedding a text editor inside Live could open up new creative possibilities. We think the answer is that yes, text can work well alongside a piano roll and a traditional musical score, as a concise and expressive way to define complex rhythms.

With Nestup, you define for yourself any rhythmic unit, rhythmic subdivision, and scaling factor. These language features let you experiment with musical ideas such as metric modulation, nested tuplets, complex polyrhythm, and more. Rhythms from musical styles which would have been prohibitively difficult to program in a DAW can therefore be rendered in MIDI, such as rhythms from Armenian folk musics or “new complexity” compositions.