![]() ![]() There's no skeuomorphic attempt to replicate a physical mixing desk, no VU meters, retro knurled knobs or fake valve glow. The interface is intuitive and deliberately graphically 'simplistic' - not dumbed-down, but reduced in complexity to its essence. trying to drag a MIDI editing tool onto an audio track - Live won't let you do it, simple as that. The key advantage of Live for many musicians - and for creative people who would consider themselves 'non-musicians' - is that anything you try just seems to work. You can simply grab hold of the tempo counter, in automation mode, ride the tempo up and down as you see fit and your tracks will follow the changes. Multiple virtual synths, samplers, drum machines and effects are a mere drag and drop away (although the full extent of Live's provision of these is dependent on the version that you own) and the software's famed time-stretching ('warping') ability is now virtually seamless in operation. It feels solid, mature and reliable, with a wealth of audio and MIDI tools that cover almost any and every eventuality. We've spent a couple of highly productive and creatively rewarding months with Ableton Live 11 Suite and we can categorically state that this is easily the best version of Live to date. ![]() Live effectively blurs the lines between a simple recording capture application - which it can do perfectly well - and a live instrument, which can be 'played' in real time either to generate new ideas or to perform (using both existing material and new ideas generated on the fly) before an audience. At any point, dropping a plug-in onto a section of recorded music could not only transform that piece, it might inspire an entirely new piece of work. There's always a sense when playing around with audio in Live that your horizons are limitless. ![]() Over the last 20 years (!), Live has found its niche as the preferred software tool of the more experimental artist, those genre-bending musicians, DJs, sound designers and turntablists who want to make music in an almost collaborative fashion with their computer - throwing multiple ideas in, from myriad sources treating, manipulating and shaping the raw material then looping the results and reacting to new ideas that this blend inspires to take the music even further. ![]() Rather than perfunctorily toss out annual incremental point updates, Ableton prefers to take its time in developing a signficant new version, gathering critical input and feedback from its active and passionate user base and beta testers. The gap between new versions has lengthened as Live's core offering stabilised (it's been three years since Live 10). This writer first entered the Abletonverse around version 2 and consequently followed Live's evolution through several rapid iterations, as the company broadened the application's remit to cover all music recording bases. It was, in its own way, quietly revolutionary. Live also introduced the concept of 'elastic audio', whereby disparate recordings and samples could be stretched or compressed as necessary to all sync to the same tempo. Ableton's Live music production software caused a seismic change in the thinking of musicians and music producers when it first appeared in 2001.īreaking away from the prevailing idea that recording music on a computer should essentially still look, and feel, like recording music on a physical mixing desk, Live focused on the more freeform concept of jamming on musical ideas, based around capturing and looping 'clips' of recorded audio. ![]()
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