Recording - June 2010 - 44

...where we bring you follow-up articles with application hints and upgrade news about gear already reviewed in Recording

Ableton Live Intro
Get some live in your life—for less
by Mike Metlay

hen I was chatting with the folks at Ableton about their newest products, I mentioned that I wanted to get a review of Live Intro into the magazine as soon as possible. They were a bit surprised, considering that in the midst of their many other initiatives—helping to develop new controllers like the Akai APC40 and APC20 and the Novation Launchpad, building a new online collaboration system, and promoting the exciting prospects in the Max For Live programming environment—Live Intro was released with fairly little fanfare. My response to this surprise could be taken as a summation of this review: “Reviewing Live Intro is a nobrainer. People need to know about Live Intro because it puts Live in everyone’s hands for very little money, and that is a very good thing.” I can sum up Live Intro in one short sentence: it’s a somewhat feature-reduced version of Live for a significantly lower price, intended as an introduction to the world of Live for the beginning musician or (far more significantly in my opinion) the musician who is already comfortable in another DAW but wants to work with Live as well. A short history of Live For those of you who might not have been paying attention: Live is a DAW that has a unique approach to music creation, an approach that’s still unlike anything else on the market even after a decade of development and 8 versions. (See our August 2009 issue for our coverage of Live 8.) It’s gained a lot of followers, and has a lot of other people curious about it... which is precisely why Live Intro is so vital. When it started out, the core idea of Live was the idea of “playing” a set of audio recordings called Clips, using an interface that’s designed to be interactive in real

From this initial idea, Live grew more features and added more capabilities while maintaining the same basic structure. With version 4, MIDI could be recorded and edited on a similar footing to audio. Version 5 introduced software instruments in a fashion that’s still more streamlined than how they’re implemented today in many competing DAWs. Massive content upgrades and useful tweaks to the already powerful engine heralded versions 6 and 7 (and the creation of the Ableton Suite, which combined Live with content libraries and built-in high-end instruments), and version 8 added advanced DAW features like track grouping. What’s remarkable is that through all of this improvement, Live remains one of the most efficient and stable DAWs out there. What’s the catch? The caveat to all this glory is that as DAWs go, Live is... well... rather unconventional. Well, no, scratch that; it’s downright weird. An audio recording program that you play like an instrument? What’s up with that? Some people take to Live instantly and won’t work in any other DAW, despite the fact that even after 8 sets of feature upgrades Live still doesn’t offer as straightforward a workflow as other DAWs when doing conventional tracking and mixing. Other people take one look at the interface, shake their heads, and back away quickly. But in between those extremes of love and hate, there are a huge number of potential users who might find Live a useful tool for composing... if only there was an easy and affordable way to get into it. Live has a built-in and fiercely loyal following, and over the years the support of its users has let it grow into a very big, very powerful program that costs a fair bit of money and takes up a lot of hard disk space. A full install of Ableton Suite 8 is over 60 GB and costs $800 boxed. The cheapest version of Live, the download of the basic program itself without the multi-GB Essential Instruments Collection 2, is still $449, and there’s a lot of competition in that price range. Users who are curious about the composition and arranging features in Live but already have time and money invested in

time and supported by a very efficient and reliable audio engine. Clips can be samples, loops, tracks of recorded instruments or vocals, and can be laid out on a grid in the now-famous Session View (see the screenshot). You can click on a Clip to play it, fire it with a keystroke, or use a MIDI command; as you play Clips, they sync and launch quantized to the beat of the song so you don’t get out-of-sync playback (unless that’s what you want). The end result is that a song is played as much as it’s sequenced; by turning Clips on and off in real time, you’re mixing and remixing your audio in a very organic and natural way. When you’re done running through your song, with a simple click of a key, the Session View becomes the Arrangement View, a more traditional-looking linear DAW layout where your performance has been remembered move for move. You can export the results as they are, or perform edits, automation, and so forth.

RECORDING JUNE 2010

Recording - June 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2010