How To Control Ableton Live With Your Apple Watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qks5xsuYQEU

There may be some extremely useful things that musicians can do with smartwatches, but using one to control Ableton Live is probably not at the top of the list.

This video, via Ableton Live Expert, demonstrates how to control Ableton Live with an Apple Watch, using the Watch Band MIDI controller.

They note, “It’s flaky, laggy, and borderline pointless, but it’s fun!”

If anybody has come up with a more practical musical application for smartwatches, leave a comment and share your thoughts!

25 thoughts on “How To Control Ableton Live With Your Apple Watch

  1. this is some hater bait for sure…
    but..then.. you know this iWatch got me thinking about wearable technology..
    I can’t help to wonder what it would be like to control Ableton live
    from a strap on…
    could get some good swing metronome type rhythms going from the hip gyrations.

  2. Seriously? Yes, give me a 600$ Smartphone, a 400$+ watch and let me stare at a mini screen while twisting my wrist. That certainly is something everybody would always want to do. Not.

  3. You can control Ableton with anything, chose an appendage? Not that one.

    So we are resolved to asking the simple question, what is it I want to do? And for me, the answer to that has never involved a wristwatch – and I imagine that is not too unusual.

    I don’t dislike the technology, it is but a tool. But I do dislike time and skills lost on mindlessness, then we have such an obvious agenda

  4. Shame it needs the phone to do anything useful. Obviously given the cost, screen size etc it’s easy to by cynical, but I imagine eventually they’ll serve some purpose in music making that will just become the norm. Let’s face it, the much derided tablets are now all over the place in gigs and TV performances by bands. Personally I’ve got a cheapo (about $120) Android smart watch (ZGPax S8) and it’s just a tiny little smart phone, doing whatever a smart phone can do but on a titchy screen. Caustic isn’t much fun on it (!), but I’ve got a really useful metronome and tuner app that are therefore with me all the time (I don’t take my phone everywhere any more).

  5. They note, “It’s flaky, laggy, and borderline pointless, but it’s fun!”
    Erm, I think maybe you all took this article a bit too seriously. I see it as a sort of ‘proof of concept’ thing.
    The watches are total foolishness but like the iPhone and the iPad, if it wasn’t for the developers making jaw-dropping apps for pocket money prices, all these devices would just be expensive, nice looking, but essentially just phones, tablets and *sigh* a watch. I’m a big fan of two of them and left cold by one – answers on a postcard, to the usual address,

  6. Just say NO to pointless trendmongering. I use a Mac and generally applaud Apple’s approaches, but this thing is like putting a spoiler on a riding lawnmower. The watch is a bust for me. It does too little and the base cost equals about a quarter of an iMac. A fairly loaded 21″ model with Logic X, 12 GB of RAM and the very worthwhile warranty will total close to $2k. Besides, a watch that requires a smartphone to really do its job? Oh so very bite me! 😛 Any DAW needs more direct interaction to really shine, IMO.

    1. A) If you don’t get it, the jokes on you.

      B) There’s a 20 year history of people making predictions like yours. If you do it for every new technology that Apple introduces, the chances are that you’ll be right on one eventually. In the meantime, they just sold a couple million $ of these things, after other companies have tried for 5 years to make wearable computers fly.

      C) I want my Dick Tracy watch and my flying car!

  7. We have one more quantum leap to make of moving the technology from the wrist watch to being held in the hand, and then we can finally come full circle back to the remote control from the 80s! I look forward to those easy, affordable functional days of future past.

  8. Perhaps if any of you synth lovers had any inclination to exercise ,you would understand where the power lies with this watch. You want to operate a DAW with this technology……..give me a brake. Y’all will change your tune soon.

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