Ableton Live 6, what more can I say that hasn’t already been written and said about this amazing piece of software. It has taken over my workstation and is an essential tool in working out new ideas. Ableton Live is as much of a performance instrument as it is a digital audio workstation.
Due to its straight forward, somewhat unconventional interface it is not what you would expect if you have grown used to traditonal sequencing and composing software. But once you get used to the “Ableton Way”, Live just starts to make sense and leads itself to an enviroment for creativity and a smooth constantly evolving workflow that is just plain fun to use. This is probably the reason that so many artists and DJs are turning to Live as their music composing, track arrangement software and is quickly becoming the tool of choice for taking on the road to gigs. Its very stable, runs well on laptops, making it great for fine tuning your tracks while travelling on busses, planes or waiting in your hotel room.
Live has a large selection of built-in midi and audio effects that should more than cover your tweaking needs. The included sample based instrument Simpler does just that, allows creation of just about any sound simply by dropping in a sample and adjusting the settings. The Impulse drum sampler comes with a wide variety of electronic as well as accoustic kits and midi “clips”. One of the more interesting and creative features of version 6 of Ableton Live is the ability to wrap these effects and instruments into “racks”. With racks you can create a seemingly endless combination of instruments/effects and then save them for future use as presets. There is a very nice 4 oscilator synth called Operater and a much more detailed Sampler instrument available as an add-on purchase as well.
You get the feeling with live that it was not created by geeky programmers or audio engineers who were more interested in the science than the song, but by musicians and perfomers who knew what they needed and got it. In reality its probably a bit of both. Ableton Live was first realeased in 2001 and was co-created by Gerhard Behles and Robert Henke of Monolake fame. Live was prototyped in Max/MSP which was also used to model some of the audio devices and then written in C++.
To get more information visit the Ableton website, a demo version is available.
Just a test of my artist description. Rodeo bull riding?
The Ableton development team has released version 8.1.5 of their Live software. The changelog was not included but should be released later today. You can download the latest version of the Ableton Live software here.
This is the best time of the year to get commercial software at a bargain price. We put our emphesis here on free software, music, plugins but if your looking to buy something for the holidays, there are quite a few discounts and group buys going on. Here are just a few…
Live 7 is a sequencing and recording music creation software package from Ableton which features an intuitive workflow enviroment all its own. Getting your ideas for a new mix or killer dance track from start to finish has never been easier than with Live. The software is updated and improved on a regular basis by the Ableton design team [...]
Drum Bits V1 was chosen as one of the “Best Ableton Instruments” in the April 2012 print edition of Beat Magazine (German).
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