Skin Editor by pechmann: Recolouring Live 9 From a Device
Most devices in the Audio Effect list do something to a signal. Skin Editor by pechmann does something to your eyes. It is a colour editor for Live 9 skins, packaged as a Max for Live audio effect, and it has been downloaded 22,008 times with a 5/5 rating across 14 comments. For a utility that never touches audio, that is a lot of people deciding they wanted to change what Live looks like badly enough to install a device for it.
What the device actually does
pechmann describes it plainly: a skin editor for Live 9 that lets you edit all colours. The author's own framing is that it is not as practical as the well-known Live 8 editor, but it covers the full colour set. You adjust colours in the device, then click Save, navigate to Live's skin directory ([Live installation directory]\Resources\Skins), and type a file name ending in .ask. That file is then a skin Live can use.
There is one hard limitation worth knowing before you start: you can only really open skin files that were created with this skin editor, plus the default skin. It is not a general-purpose importer for someone else's .ask file. In practice that means every skin you build starts from the default and grows from there, and your own saved files are the only ones you can reopen and revise later.
The version is 1.0, added 7 March 2013, with no update since. It lists Live 9.0.1 and Max 6.1 as requirements. That date is the single most important fact about this device and it shapes everything below.
Three sessions where a custom skin earns its place
The stage laptop. Club lighting and a glossy screen are a bad combination. If you play live from a Session View grid, the colours that matter are the ones telling you which clip is playing, which is queued, and which track is armed. Build a skin that pushes contrast hard on exactly those elements and flattens everything else into a dark, low-noise background. Save it as something like stage-high-contrast.ask. Then make a second pass for the opposite case — daylight, outdoor stage, washed-out screen — and keep both files. Switching skins before a set takes seconds; redesigning your template does not.
The long mixing session. Live's default colour balance is a design decision, not a law. If you spend six hours a day on arrangement, small changes to background brightness, waveform colour and grid line contrast add up. The useful approach is incremental: open the editor, change two or three colours, save a new file, restart into it, and work for a day. If it feels better, keep going from that file. If it does not, go back to the previous one. Because the editor can reopen its own saved files, you can keep a small chain of versions rather than trying to get it right in one sitting.
The shared screen. Teaching, screen recording, projecting a session onto a wall for a collaborator — all three punish Live's default subtle greys. Thin contrast that reads fine at 30cm disappears on a projector or through video compression. A dedicated "projector" skin with heavier separation between track headers, clip slots and the arrangement background makes the difference between a watchable walkthrough and a grey smear.
How to run it without it getting in the way
It is an audio effect, so it loads on any audio track. A few practical habits:
- Put it on a dedicated utility track with no input and no output routing, rather than dropping it into a chain you care about. You are not using it for sound, so keep it out of the signal path entirely.
- Do the colour work in a scratch set, not in the project you are mixing. Skin editing is fiddly and you will be restarting Live to see results properly.
- Name files descriptively and keep them all.
dark-v3.askanddark-v4.askcost nothing to keep and save you re-deriving a colour you liked a month ago. - Back up the skins folder somewhere outside the Live installation directory. Reinstalling or upgrading Live can wipe it.
The device is released under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, so if you pass around modified versions of the device itself, credit pechmann, keep it non-commercial, and share alike.
Who should skip it
Anyone not running Live 9. The listed requirements are Live 9.0.1 and Max 6.1, the version has sat at 1.0 since 2013, and there is no update. If you are on a current Live version, treat this as a historical device rather than a tool you can rely on, and check it against your own setup before you plan any workflow around it.
Skip it too if what you want is to tweak a skin someone else made. The editor only opens its own files and the default skin, so a downloaded .ask is a dead end here. And skip it if you are hunting for sound — the Audio Effect tag is doing administrative work in this case, not describing the function.
What the numbers mean next to its neighbours
22,008 downloads and a clean 5/5 put Skin Editor right in the middle of a cluster of Audio Effect devices with similar reach. High School Crush by CaligulaCuddles sits at 22,140 with a triple parallel bit crusher and downsampler, and we covered it in more depth in a separate piece. 3X Parameter Sequencer by lvehon leads this group at 23,749, sequencing parameters of Live's internal devices and plug-ins through the API. Crap Cassette by SESDevices, a C90-on-a-bad-deck emulation, has 20,731. Device Randomizer by Hanako, which randomises selected device parameters and can store its settings with the Live set, has 21,293 and a 4/5.
Four of those five rate 5/5, which tells you the rating is better read as a filter than a ranking: devices that reach five figures of downloads and stay badly broken do not keep perfect scores. The more interesting signal is the spread of function. Within one category you have a bit crusher, a tape emulation, a parameter sequencer, a randomiser and a skin editor. The Audio Effect category is where anything that loads on an audio track ends up, which is why browsing it by popularity surfaces tools that have nothing in common except their slot in the device chain.
The case for keeping it in mind
Skin Editor is not a device you open weekly. It is a device you open once, spend an hour with, and then benefit from every day after. Twenty-two thousand downloads for a tool with a single narrow job, no updates since 2013 and a documented limitation in its own description suggests the job was worth doing. If you are still on Live 9 — and plenty of people are, for stable live rigs that nobody wants to touch — an hour building a skin for the room you actually play in is one of the cheaper upgrades available. If you are not, the rest of the category has more immediately useful company.