Keyboard Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 57) AUDITION Reality check: You can download a fully-functional demo of Ableton’s much-anticipated Live 7, or even the whole-enchilada Ableton Suite, at the company’s website, as well as several new optional instruments. So, you can decide for yourself if you’re interested — which makes writing a review moot. Or does it? Despite Live having been around for several years, it’s still somewhat enigmatic. Some musicians had an immediate affinity with the program, while others couldn’t wrap their heads around it. And its chameleonic nature doesn’t help: Some think it’s a DJ program, some a DAW, some a musical instrument, and so on (hint: They’re all correct). So this is a perfect opportunity to give some subjective impressions about the program’s gestalt, and in the process, explain why I think Live is so incredibly cool. OVERVIEW What makes Live unique is its split personality. Its Arrangement view resembles a traditional DAW, with linear tracks, lanes for automation (having individual lanes for each automation parameter is new in Live 7), inserts, aux sends, and the like. But what attracts me the most is the Session view, which is a unique way of organizing “clips” (single-shot files, loops, or even entire songs) for playback that feels much more like a musical instrument than a sequencer. Session view is a matrix, with columns containing clips, and rows containing groups of clips, which together constitute a “scene.” For example, one scene might have three clips in three columns: a drum loop, a bass loop, and a one-shot of some vocal phrase. Another scene might have the same drum loop but a different bass loop and a rhythmic piano riff. When you trigger a scene, all the clips launch simultaneously, based on what quantization option you choose (e.g., you can trigger the clips at measure boundaries). The ability to assemble clips into different scenes is important because only one clip in a column can play at a given moment. But this is a strength, not a limitation, because you don’t have to trigger a scene to launch clips. You can launch any clip, at any time, and quantize its launch to the beat. So, suppose one column has nothing but drum clips. You can trigger a scene, and keep all the scene clips grooving along but select different drum clips as the mood strikes you. When you pick a new drum clip, the previous one will keep playing until the next measure (if that’s the launch quantization value you selected), at which point it exits gracefully. What’s more, tempo isn’t an issue because Live’s audio engine will analyze a clip and stretch it to fit as needed. It can also transpose pitch, but as with other programs, the results usually sound less natural than when stretching rhythm. It does this with more than just short clips: One of Live’s near-magical feats is that you can bring in a long song that wasn’t cut to a click, and most of the time, Live will slice and stretch it so that it locks to tempo. No wonder DJs love this program. That’s just the basics. As a side note, when Live 6 (reviewed Jan. ’07) came out, I met with Ableton’s Gerhard Behles at the Frankfurt Musikmesse trade show. As he described all the new features, I mentioned that I felt kind of silly that I used Live pretty much the same way as I did when it first appeared. He looked at me somewhat quizzically and said, “There’s nothing wrong with that.” True indeed: If you watch 20 different people use Live, they’ll make music in 20 different ways. I’ve seen everything from avant-garde composer George Lewis run Live on two laptops to create sound collages, to DJs “spinning” on it the way others would use Native Instruments Traktor, to Kid Beyond employing it in his human beatbox performances, and I even gigged in Europe with someone who used it solely as a vocal signal processor. Personally, I use it for a solo remix act with live accompaniment — sort of a “performing engineer” thing. There’s no one-sentence description of what Live is. NEW INSTRUMENTS The three new soft synths — Electric, Tension, and Analog — were designed in collaboration with Applied Acoustics Systems and recall their Lounge Lizard, String Studio VS-1, and Ultra Analog VA-1, respectively. The Ableton instruments cost less, but don’t work with other hosts. Analog is your basic two-oscillator architecture with some novel routing options; I’d put it in the “utilitarian” category rather than the “inspired” one, although I do like the sound quality. You get solid basses, ethereal string synth sounds, and more; scratch below the surface to find goodies like hard sync and filter saturation. If you already have a good virtual analog synth, though, you’ll find no “must-have” factor here. Electric is another matter. If you don’t yet have a virtual electric piano, look no further. Because it uses modeling rather than sampling, there’s much more versatility concerning how you can vary the ton of parameters compared to a sampled electric piano. Tension is another winner, and again uses modeling for a variety of string-like sounds, including basses, guitars, and various ethnic sounds. They’re an interesting combination of real and surreal; the guitars don’t sound exactly like guitars, but to use a visual analogy, they’re like airbrushed guitars with the color saturation bumped up. Drum Machines is great if you’re into vintage drum machines. The samples are extremely good; while you don’t have the same breadth of sounds as Big Fish Audio’s superb Drums Overkill, you only pay about a third as much. I like it a lot. The Essential Instrument Collection (EIC) sounds are produced in conjunction with Sonivox, and what’s there adds a lot to Live’s arsenal of sounds. For a really serious instrument, consider spending extra for Muse (reviewed Mar. ’07), Sonivox’s flagship “soft workstation,” or a similar program. Finally, I’d classify Session Drums as good, but not great. For a little more you can buy, say, Toontrack EZ Drummer, which is more flexible and works with other hosts. On the other hand, Session Drums takes advantage of Live’s Drum Rack feature, so it fits Live like a glove, which makes editing the sounds extremely simple. We’re talking very tight integration. You may prefer the à la carte approach to adding instruments, but the price for Suite with Live 7, all the above instruments, plus Operator and Sampler (introduced in previous versions), adds about $500 to the Live 7 download price. From a bundle standpoint, that’s a significant amount of instrument power. IMPROVISATION Another key Live element is that it encourages improvisation on many levels. In fact, I feel that using Live Fig. 1. Live’s pattern-oriented MIDI sequencing makes it especially easy to come up with drum parts; note the decay time envelope superimposed on the note data, which (of course) you can mess with in real time! VITAL STATS SOFTWARE VERSION REVIEWED 7.0.1. MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Mac: G4 processor (G5 or Intel recommended), OS 10.3.9 or later. PC: 1.5GHz processor, Windows XP or Vista. Both: 512MB RAM (1GB or more recommended). AUDIO HARDWARE SUPPORT Mac: Core Audio. PC: ASIO, MME, DirectX. PLUG-IN FORMATS HOSTED Ableton, VST, AU. NUMBER OF TRACKS CPU-dependent, no limitations placed by Live software. COPY PROTECTION Unlock code provided upon registration. 03-2008 keyboard 57
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